On Thursday, Feb. 5, an event hosted by the Engaged Pluralism (EP) program featuring Steven Cash ’84 was disrupted by a group of students and community members. Cash’s lecture, entitled “The State of Democracy and its Uneasiness with Race, Disability, and Non-normative Subjectivity,” was originally scheduled to take place from 5:30 to 7 p.m. in Rockefeller Hall 300. A large portion of the event’s audience protested in a variety of ways, including yelling over Cash, chanting, clapping and holding signs. As a result, the event was canceled 40 minutes after it began. Protestors cited Cash’s involvement in creating the USA PATRIOT Act and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as his work in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Cash worked at the CIA from 1994 to 2001. In 2001, Cash joined the professional staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, where he worked on the USA PATRIOT Act, which was passed 45 days after Sept. 11 and effectively expanded law enforcement’s surveillance and investigative powers. The Act disproportionately affected Arab and Muslim Americans, who were frequently targeted by law enforcement and faced increased rates of xenophobia and hate crimes.
Additionally, Cash was instrumental in the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which consolidated 22 federal agencies into the DHS in order to streamline intelligence and border security. In 2006, Cash entered the private sector, where he worked as a consultant focusing on intelligence issues. He returned to government work in 2022, pivoting to the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, where he served as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary.
Currently, Cash is the Executive Director of The Steady State, a nonprofit organization of over 370 former national security officials that utilizes intelligence tactics to assess the status of American democracy. The Steady State speaks out against the threats to democracy enacted by the Trump administration. The organization’s most recent Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics report stated: “We assess with high confidence that the cumulative effect of the Trump Administration’s ongoing actions indicates that democratic backsliding continues. While some institutional resistance exists and may be growing, the trajectory poses both immediate and long-term risks to constitutional order and national security.”
Cash previously visited Vassar in September, where he delivered a talk on the state of American democracy. His Feb. 5 talk, which was moderated by Professor of Political Science on the Margaret Stiles Halleck Chair Sidney Plotkin, was set to address similar concerns.
Prior to the event, the Vassar Students for Justice in Palestine (VSJP) Instagram account posted a pamphlet entitled “Department of Hatred and Surveillance: Vassar Celebrates Surveillance Stooge.” While the VSJP account digitally distributed the pamphlet, students interviewed by The Miscellany News emphasized that the disruption was organized independently of any student organization. Outside the auditorium, several students distributed print versions of the pamphlet, which detailed and condemned his career. It read: “EP claims to promote healthy dialogue, but in fact platforms fascism by validating Cash’s misleading self-promotion as a voice of ‘democratic’ governance. By honoring Cash’s work and inviting West Point officers and cadets to campus, Vassar is complicit in US domestic terrorism and genocidal violence.” The pamphlet concluded, “Real unity requires knowing our enemies: the ideas, institutions, and procedures that maintain western hegemony. We must condemn ICE, the DHS, the PATRIOT Act, the CIA, the ongoing War on Terror, Zionism, and American militarism as part of the same imperialist project. The ultimate obstacle to liberation is the surveillance state that Cash helped create.”
Cash resigned from the DHS on Jan. 20, 2025—President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day. In his resignation letter, which he posted on LinkedIn, Cash wrote: “Intelligence agencies, particularly domestically focused ones, have often been tools and engines of authoritarianism and dictatorship. I am proud to have been part of an Intelligence Community whose culture includes a recognition of how dangerous intelligence agencies can be to our democracy.” He continued, “I fear that a President Trump will end our democracy. I cannot, in good conscience, be a part of that.”
Students who participated in the protest explained to The Miscellany News that Cash’s current anti-Trump stance did not dissuade them from protesting his past work in the federal government. One student said, “I think it’s absurd to act like being against Trump is enough, because so many people are against Trump, and so many people are against Trump and want to do the same things Trump is doing at a slower rate. They want ICE to deport people and tear families apart like they did under the Obamas. And they want them to do it less noticeably. And that’s not acceptable.”
The demonstration follows widespread national protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which serves as the principal investigative arm of the DHS. In 2026 alone, eight people have either been killed by federal agents or died in ICE custody. ICE held a record-high number of individuals in detention—73,000—in January 2026, and the organization plans to greatly expand its detention capabilities. This includes a proposed local detention center, set to be located in a Chester warehouse.
Director of EP and Associate Professor of Education Kimberly Williams Brown began the event, telling the audience, “We understand palpably that this is a tough moment and that people are having a hard time figuring out how to engage each other during this moment, who to trust and what to do… My hope tonight is that as Professor Plotkin and Mr. Cash speak to you, that you too will become clear about how to direct your anger and righteous indignation at those who have corrupted the experiment of a deeply flawed but complex nation state, and that you will engage them with nuance and curiosity to hear how together we may create coalitions across our differences.”
As Cash began to address the audience, several students stood up and raised signs, which included phrases such as: “I like my ICE crushed,” “Fuck the PATRIOT Act” and “He is not on our side.”
In response, Cash stated, “I’m pretty sure a lot of people in this audience don’t have much in common with me, other than being associated with Vassar. I’m a former CIA officer, I specialized in covert action. And most recently, I was a senior advisor for the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security.” At this, several boos erupted throughout the crowd.
Cash continued: “So why am I here? Because if we don’t do anything, we are not going to vote again. And it’s not an issue that can be taken on by old guys like me. This is your moment. The students here, you need to do something.”
Throughout the event, students periodically interrupted Cash to challenge his career and his motives. One student said, “How can you claim to support dialogue when you come to this movement doing anything less than begging for the forgiveness of families whose blood you have on your hands?” Upon being asked to follow the Q&A format of the event, another student yelled, “No dialogue with fascists!”
Another student questioned why Cash received his Medal of Merit from the CIA. He responded: “It was in furtherance of a directive from the President endorsed by your Representative in Congress. Actually, [it was] to support a movement against a dictator overseas.”
Each student who interrupted Cash was escorted out of the auditorium. In response to each removal, members of the crowd clapped, stomped and cheered, drowning out both the protesting speaker and Williams Brown’s calls for students to protest silently or ask a question. The event continued in this manner for approximately 30 minutes.
Cash frequently responded to students’ accusations directly. In one such instance, he stated, “So the point is that we are in a place in American history that we have not been before. And maybe it is the result of inequity and anti-democratic tendencies, but we are at a point of no return. And so if we are not able to have the kind of dialogue which clearly we were not able to have tonight, we will lose.”
He continued, “And I can tell you the Ministry of Interior in other countries is not going to respect and escort you gently out while you scream at me. We are not going to be living in a country where we can sit, for now more than half an hour, and have this kind of back and forth. You will be crushed. None of you will survive.”
At this point, Plotkin addressed the crowd for the first time, saying, “This morning, on the front page of The New York Times, was a story that went into some details about state universities in the United States, on this day, at this time whose faculty members’ syllabi must now go public, go before state legislature. If those syllabi dare to criticize anything about the United States and its history, then God save those faculty members because they are done… Do you think Vassar is somehow insulated from the forces that work in this society?”
Shortly after Plotkin’s statement, audience members began arguing with one another. At 6:10 p.m., Williams Brown announced that the event would be cut short. She stated, “People are screaming at each other, and so at this point, it doesn’t feel safe to be in this space anymore, which feels very disappointing to me. So we are going to cancel the event.”
“It was terribly disappointing,” Cash told The Miscellany News the next morning. “What was also concerning, I mean, if I had been able to speak, one of the things that I would have said is in dictatorships that my organization has spent a lot of time looking at, one of the things that the dictator tries to do is create events like last night, in which organizations and people who are trying to organize against them are split.”
Cash claimed that the DHS, at its inception, was widely supported. “The pressure to do something after 9/11 was intense,” he said. “It wasn’t some right-wing conspiracy that created DHS. It was an overwhelmingly bipartisan effort, overwhelmingly supported by the American people.”
While the Homeland Security Act of 2002 was ultimately passed by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush, it was not without opposition. Several advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), raised concerns about the potential degradation of civil liberties that the DHS could enact. In 2002, the ACLU released a statement calling the proposal “constitutionally bankrupt” for its lack of privacy and civil rights protections. In 2022, the ACLU similarly called upon the Biden administration to fundamentally reconstruct the DHS, writing, “The Biden administration has shifted away from the Trump administration’s use of DHS to police protests and abandoned several abusive programs. But in too many ways, DHS remains on course to continue imperiling civil liberties.”
Throughout the event, several students condemned the role that Cash played in laying the groundwork for the current administration’s abuses of power. “On the Department of Homeland Security, I would have said when we created it, and I did work on creating it, we were very well aware that we were creating a very dangerous, large organization. And we built in lots and lots of guardrails in there,” Cash stated. “I think those guardrails are being stripped away. The Department of Homeland Security is becoming what we tried to have it not.”
Cash pointed toward the Trump administration’s increased human rights abuses, emphasizing that students at colleges such as Vassar must take a stand. He said, “One of the things I would have ended with is some variation of a call to action. I really do think this is your generation’s moment…People are getting killed. We have thousands and thousands of people in what can only really be called concentration camps. We are shutting down a lot of academia.
The media has been largely cowed. People are afraid for their jobs, afraid for their personal safety.”
In his interview with The Miscellany News, Cash also acknowledged the protestors’ Instagram post, which quoted him as having said “We are generally the bad guys” in May 2025. “Well, there’s more to that sentence,” he said. “I am very well aware that people with my skillset and my profession overseas are usually the bad guys… The whole point is, once you make the decision as a democracy that you need people with my skills, you also wanna constrain them. You wanna keep them on a leash.”
President Elizabeth Bradley addressed the event in an email sent to the Vassar community on Feb. 6. It stated: “I understand from some audience members that the repeated and coordinated verbal interruptions—which included students shouting profanities at the speaker—were difficult and, at times, frightening to witness. The atmosphere in the room made any meaningful dialogue or productive discussion impossible, despite the speaker’s attempts to engage cooperatively… Vassar endorses peaceful protest, and some students stood quietly and held signs that did not obstruct the speaker. Other protesters shut down speech and impeded the ability of our community to dialogue, learn, and grow.”
In written correspondence with The Miscellany News, Williams Brown similarly echoed disappointment in the event’s cancellation. She wrote, “The protesters had worked to create an agitated and verbally charged state. When we weighed the safety concerns, it seemed best to cancel before anyone, including the students who protested, potentially got hurt.”
Students who participated in the protest, meanwhile, claimed the disruption sought to build community. In an interview with The Miscellany News, one student said, “I think it was a really beautiful collective moment. A lot of the messaging sounds negative when it’s like, ‘We don’t want Steven Cash, we want to abolish ICE,’ when it’s a lot of what we don’t want. But I think that that disruption and that event was a building of what we do want.”
In terms of the administration’s response to the protest, the student stated, “I noticed and was really concerned in the email that [President Bradley] made a distinction and said that some people protested peacefully by holding up signs, and some people disrupted. All these disruptions fit in the category of peaceful protests, and to separate those, I think, is really misleading and is scary, because that’s a tool straight out of the DHS playbook, and that’s what we’re fighting against.”
The student continued, “Dissent isn’t gonna happen on their terms. If it fits every framework laid out by the dominant power perfectly, is it protest? Is it dissent?”
Another student echoed the collaborative atmosphere of the protest, saying, “The thing that stood out to me the most was how students that weren’t involved in the planning at all were joining in the discussion. The main thing was clapping that would continue after someone got walked out… It felt really good. I felt like we had the student body behind us.”
In written correspondence with The Miscellany News, one student wrote, “Cash himself is not the root of the issue, nor is any individual point of ideological disagreement I may have with him. The problem is the way that an event like this erases history and prevents accountability as far as his implication in the War on Terror’s legal and bureaucratic infrastructure is concerned.”