Lewis & Clark College

Lewis and Clark College is hosting an international affairs symposium Tuesday evening, during which Jessica Vaughan, policy director for the Center for Immigration Studies, is set to speak. CIS has been identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

(Kristyna Wentz-Graff)

A symposium on international affairs at Lewis & Clark College has drawn the ire of local activists after a professor identified one of the speakers as the policy director of an organization that's been deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Jessica Vaughan is the policy director for the Center for Immigration Studies. She regularly retweets arrest announcements by Immigration and Customs Enforcements as well as columns from right-wing websites like Fox News and Breitbart.

Vaughan is also a contributor for the conservative National Review.

Back in February, The Washington Post gave three Pinocchios to a claim Vaughan made -- later repeated by White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller -- that 72 individuals from the countries listed in President Trump's original travel ban had been linked to terrorist activity.

Vaughan has also falsely claimed that the Obama Administration released 36,000 undocumented immigrants from detention in 2013.

In an op-ed in The Huffington Post, Lewis and Clark history professor Elliott Young writes that the the symposium on international affairs' student organizers are providing a "safe space" for those with radical right-wing views.

Vaughan is speaking during a panel titled, "The Huddled Masses: Displacement in a Time of Crisis."

The talk is limited to Lewis & Clark College students who present ID at the door and will cover refugee resettlement as the humanitarian crisis in Syria continues.

Portland's Resistance is planning a protest during the event. A Facebook page has been created for the event, which will begin at the Templeton Building on the Southwest Portland campus at 6 p.m.

--Eder Campuzano | 503.221.4344

@edercampuzano

ecampuzano@oregonian.com