Students and faculty at Western Michigan University are mourning the loss of Javier Becerril Garcia, who, still very much alive, but had his Fulbright Award-sponsored WMU visiting professorship revoked by the U.S. State Department.

“Before we could even begin, he was gone,” Mia Breznau, a WMU student climate change activist, told MLive.

“I was really devastated,” Abigail Jueskstock, a WMU junior studying freshwater sustainability, told WOOD.

Garcia, his wife, and 9-year-old daughter were set to move to Michigan from Mexico in August through a Fulbright Award from the State Department to share his wisdom on “decoloniality,” “degrowth,” and the impacts of climate change on the economies of vulnerable populations.

The Autonomous University of Yukatan professor landed the taxpayer-funded award during the Biden administration to foster collaboration between the U.S. and Mexico on climate change research, according to a WMU news release cited by MLive.

“Trying to create justice, trying to create mutual understanding between countries around questions of justice and questions of climate change is some of the most important work we could be doing,” said Allen Webb, a professor on WMU’s Climate Change Working Group who works on the Fulbright Scholar Program.

Then tragedy struck.

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Citing “changing priorities of the (White House) administration,” the State Department canceled Garcia’s scholar-in-residence grant, and without the taxpayer cash, Garcia may not make it to Michigan to discuss the cultural dimensions of climate change.

An email to Garcia notified him the program is “no longer consistent with the administration’s priorities,” WOOD reports.

Dee Sherwood, a social work professor and advisor for the WMU Native American Student Organization, described the development as “profoundly disappointing.”

“It’s rare to have a scholar with a focus on Indigenous science in residence on campus at WMU for a full year,” Sherwood told MLive. “Students would have enjoyed learning about Myan practices and facilitating communication and collaboration between Indigenous nations.”

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Of course, Garcia is still welcome in Michigan, but he’d have to pay his own way.

Webb, an English professor who was planning to co-teach a class about social and cultural aspects of climate change with Garcia, predicts the canceled award will have consequences because “the climate crisis is coming at us like a freight train.”

“The kind of thing the grant offered was an opportunity to work across countries to develop understanding of each other and define strategies that would help us address the climate crisis,” he told WOOD. “We’ve got to take action to solve the planet crisis so we have a planet that’s going to be livable to us all.”

The decision to cancel the award is in line with efforts by the Trump administration to unravel expensive climate change regulations imposed by the Biden administration with a focus on lowering costs for Americans.

On March 12, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced 31 “historic actions” to reduce regulations he said would maintain the EPA’s core mission of protecting the environment, while fulfilling the 47^th POTUS’ promise to promote American energy, lower costs, revitalize the auto industry, and return decision-making to the states.

“Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” Zeldin said in a statement. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down the cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.”

Zeldin contends the deregulation will remove trillions in regulatory costs that serve as hidden taxes on U.S. families.

That’s “unacceptable,” WMU’s Breznau told WOOD.

“We see the track this country is heading on, and students like myself will not stand for this mistreatment of experts and suppression of knowledge,” she said.

Webb told MLive he’s now working with WMU’s attorneys to investigate the canceled award and assess what he can do about it.

Webb contends “there’s no point” in applying for another grant because he’s convinced Trump is focused on “canceling any government efforts addressing climate change.”