As state lawmakers head back to Sacramento for the final stretch of the year’s legislative session, which often ends in a flurry of last-minute votes in mid-September, the American Civil Liberties Union in California is ringing the alarm bell on Senate Bill 1287, saying that it will “set a dangerous precedent of chilling speech on campuses across the state.”

The bill, introduced in February by Democratic state Sen. Steve Glazer, would require schools to adopt and enforce rules against harassment, discrimination, or any behavior that “creates a hostile environment on campus.” 

Glazer and the bill’s supporters, which include a host of pro-Israel advocacy groups, say the bill protects all students’ safety and free speech, regardless of their positions. Glazer has defended his bill from critics who view the measure as a part of a larger effort to curb free speech of the student activists who voice support for Palestine, and has amended it to remove some of its most targeted language. 

Still, Glazer’s approach to the issue of protests against Israel is clear, even if he argues it has nothing to do with the bill. “I’m not trying to hide my opinion, I just haven’t said a lot about it because I know why people want to make this be about pro-Palestinian, anti-Palestinian bill,” Glazer told The Intercept. “I would argue, pro-Hamas, anti-Hamas,” Glazer continued, referring to how he would frame the debate, before immediately disavowing the idea that he was framing the debate at all.

“Whatever framing you want to use to make your case, people are doing that — I’m not,” Glazer said.

The original version of the bill was bluntly aimed at criminalizing pro-Palestine protests when it was drafted, said Leena Sabagh, an advocate and a policy manager with the Council on Islamic-American Relations. 

The original bill included a proposed ban on a “call for or support of genocide,” which Sabagh took as a direct attempt to prohibit the common protest slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The “genocide” language was eventually cut from the bill after pushback by free speech advocates and state assembly members who were concerned the ban would violate First Amendment rights. 

“It was very clear who this bill was targeting,” Sabagh said, pointing to the original “genocide” provision. Students who support Palestine have already been met with intense pushback from schools, including police violence, arrests, and suspensions. The bill would give universities even more tools to punish students who are protesting in support of Palestine, she added. 

“There’s both aspects — it’s generally unconstitutional, and on top of that, we know what the application of this bill would lead to,” Sabagh said. “We see who’s currently being targeted and suppressed by universities: It’s the Palestinian students, it’s Arab students, it’s Muslim students, and the Jewish students who support Palestine, and all other students who are protesting in support of Palestine.” 

Among the bill’s most vocal detractors has been ACLU California Action, which said in a letter sent last week to Glazer’s office that the amended bill would still suppress free speech. In the letter, obtained by The Intercept, the ACLU highlighted areas of the bill that are “overly broad” and vague, such as leaving terms like “harassment,” “discrimination,” and “hostile environment” with no clear definitions that may allow institutions to apply them in ways that prohibit students’ free speech.

Glazer’s bill would also require students to acknowledge the new set of rules as a condition of their enrollment at a school. It also institutes a training program that would “educate students on how to exchange views in an atmosphere of mutual respect and civility.” If the bill passes a vote in the state Assembly and is signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, it would apply to the state’s community colleges, California State University’s 23 campuses, and the 10 campuses in the University of California system, which together enroll more than 2.6 million students each year.

“We foresee this mandate being applied in ways that unnecessarily restrict protected speech,” the ACLU wrote, “resulting in both indefensible censorship and administrative discipline.” The group also anticipated costly lawsuits as a possible outcome from uneven enforcement of the policy across the dozens of state campuses. 

Apartheid Then, but Not Now

The state Senate passed the bill with a near-unanimous vote in late May, as student encampments and demonstrations calling for institutional divestment from Israel sprouted on campuses across the U.S. How schools have responded to campus protests — some promised to consider divesting, others called in police raids in which hundreds of students and faculty faced violence, arrest, and suspension — has been the subject of widespread debate and scrutiny over free speech rights of students. Reports of antisemitic incidents at schools have also raised questions around free speech and double standards.

When advocating for his bill ahead of the vote, Glazer mentioned his own record of activism, having led a movement against South African apartheid while a student at San Diego State University, advocating for schools to divest from banks that had investments in South Africa. Advocates for the ongoing divestment movement against Israel’s government have drawn inspiration from the South Africa divestment movement of the late 1980s. The United Nation’s top court recently declared Israel’s occupation of the West Bank illegal and said that it amounts to apartheid of the Palestinian people. 

However, Glazer in his interview with The Intercept was quick to shoot down any suggestion that he was drawing a connection between South Africa and Israel. 

“I brought up my own activism to show that I’m not immune to seeing injustices in the world — I’ve been very active in my own life in trying to advance justice,” Glazer told The Intercept, “but we didn’t do it by denying other students their free speech rights. We didn’t do it with intimidation and harassment and violence against those who had a different view.”

The bill mirrors a larger trend within the University of California school system and among lawmakers to suppress protests that are in support of Palestine and are critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, said Constance Penley, president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, the political arm of faculty members across the UC system. The group also opposes the bill.

Penley pointed to a new rule that bans departments from posting political statements on UC departmental websites after several ethnic studies departments expressed support for Palestinian “freedom from an apartheid system” and condemned Israel for its “genocidal attack on Gaza.” The UC regents issued the ban in July amid concern that anti-Israel views on school sites could be construed as an official UC stance.

State lawmakers are also withholding $25 million in funds from the UC until it enacts and enforces new rules around free speech in response to campus protests from the spring. Glazer said his bill is complementary to the legislature’s rules mandate, through the state budget, but clarified that he was not a part of the budgeting decision.

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Across the U.S., lawmakers on the state and federal level have introduced bills cracking down on campus protests. In Congress, Republican lawmakers proposed a slate of bills, including measures that would revoke visas and deport any international student convicted of a crime related to protests on campus; bar students convicted of a protest-related crime from receiving financial aid; make federal accreditation and funding for schools contingent on their policies toward protests; barring a student of faculty member from student loan forgiveness if they are expelled or fired due to protests; and withholding federal funds from schools that don’t clear encampments. Rep. Andy Ogles, a Republican from Tennessee who is behind several of the bills, also introduced one that would require a student convicted of a protest-related offense to do community service in Gaza for six months. 

Pennsylvania is mirroring several of the congressional bills, such as a measure withholding financial aid from student protesters convicted of a crime, and a bill that would withhold state funding to any institution that boycotts or divests from Israel. Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was among Kamala Harris’s top picks for running mate, has reportedly said he would sign the anti-divestment bill into law if passed. 

“It’s part and parcel,” Penley said of S.B. 1287 and the nationwide crackdown on protests and effort to force universities to institute new policies around campus speech.

The Palestine Exception

Even before October 7, UC officials made their position on Israel and Palestine known in a controversial 2018 letter signed by chancellors from all 10 of its campuses, which opposed an academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions despite growing calls from their students to do so. The majority of the system’s student bodies have passed resolutions in support of divestment and the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. In 2015, the UC Student Association passed an unprecedented call to divest from corporations that “profit from violations of Palestinian human rights.” The chancellors published their letter after lobbying by the AMCHA Initiative, which considers movements critical of the state of Israel, such as BDS, to be antisemitic. School officials once again rejected boycotts of Israel earlier this year responding to the majority of campus student governments who passed similar resolutions supporting BDS boycotts. AMCHA also pushed for the ban on comments posted to department websites, with the support of a coalition of UC faculty, breaking from the faculty’s governing bodies. 

“There is something about S.B. 1287 that you can’t understand unless you understand how entwined it is with this ongoing fight around the Palestine exception to [free speech],” Penley said. 

She referred to a 2015 report by Palestine Legal and the Center of Constitutional Rights, “The Palestine Exception,” a first-of-its-kind study that analyzed 300 incidents across 65 U.S. college campuses in which schools or government officials suppressed Palestinian human rights advocacy from students and professors. Pushback included event cancellations, legal complaints, administrative discipline, firings, and “false accusations of terrorism and antisemitism.”

The study focuses on instances in which statements critical of Israeli policy were construed as antisemitism. It’s a tactic employed by various pro-Israeli advocacy groups that are among S.B. 1287’s most ardent supporters. Among them is the Anti-Defamation League, which has a history of advocating for post-9/11 anti-terrorism laws to undermine support for Palestinians in the U.S. Earlier this year the group leveled the unsubstantiated accusation that Students for Justice in Palestine had sent money to Hamas, urging schools to investigate students without providing evidence. 

Defining Antisemitism

Although Glazer has been adamant that the bill itself is “content-neutral” and doesn’t favor any particular side, he has said he was motivated by reports of incidents of antisemitism on college campuses. 

Glazer has cited an incident where students at UC Berkeley shut down a speaker event for an Israeli attorney and former Israel Defense Forces soldier, Ran Bar-Yoshafat, who described himself as “right-wing, hawkish Israeli.” The university said windows were broken and protesters intimidated students attending the event, which was organized by Zionist, pro-Israel student groups. Glazer has also pointed to a now-deleted tweet from a UC Davis professor who posted a threat toward “Zionist journalists who spread propaganda and misinformation,” and continued, “they can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more,” alongside emojis of a knife, an ax, and a drop of blood. Glazer, who is Jewish, has condemned both incidents as examples of antisemitism on college campuses. 

The Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California, a pro-Israel lobbying group, which used to offer annual trips for California lawmakers to Israel to promote the Israeli government, is one of the bill’s biggest backers and has echoed Glazer’s concerns. A lobbyist for the group, Cliff Berg, has been present at each of the bill’s eight committee hearings since it was introduced, praising the bill for its ability to “fight antisemitism in higher education campuses,” and referencing an ADL report that said antisemitic incidents on campuses more than doubled since October 7. 

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Both the ADL and JPAC adhere to the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism, which many Zionist groups and lawmakers across the U.S. have interpreted to include criticism against the state of Israel, an interpretation decried even by the author of the definition. JPAC is also among top donors to Glazer’s campaign for state treasurer, contributing $5,000 in late June and $2,350 for Glazer’s reelection in 2020, according to state records.

JPAC is also lobbying for a number of separate California bills focused on education policy, including A.B. 2918, which would set up stricter oversight of ethnic studies curriculum in K-12 public schools. The law is meant to address, in part, course materials like those from the Santa Ana Unified School District in Southern California, which included lessons on Israel’s history of occupation in Palestine’s West Bank, the impacts of its blockade in Gaza, and human rights violations committed in both regions. The ADL has criticized the lessons as being antisemitic and one-sided. 

Rebecca Arvizu, a board member of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace — which includes leaders from Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim faiths and also opposed S.B. 1287 — said such bills are a part of “the weaponization of antisemitism” to “dehumanize and suppress” those who support the rights of Palestinians. 

“These false narratives running through the press dehumanize and suppress these voices,” she said. 

Arvizu and her group have been tracking lawmakers and organizations that try to discredit the pro-Palestine movement by conflating criticisms of Israeli policy with antisemitism.

She pointed to a letter drafted by the California Legislative Jewish Caucus in January that raised the alarm about rising antisemitism, but went on to attack K-12 school districts for teaching history lessons that were critical of Israel as “bigoted, inaccurate, discriminatory, and deeply offensive anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda.” The caucus decried local resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza from the cities of Oakland and Long Beach as providing “a platform for “bigots to express hateful conspiracy theories and extreme anti-Jewish vitriol,” without providing examples to back their claim. It also criticized protesters advocating for a ceasefire for shutting down the California Democratic Party Convention in November. 

Finishing What Reagan Started

S.B. 1287 must pass through its final hurdle on Thursday when the California State Assembly’s appropriations committee votes on the bill, before reaching the assembly floor for a final vote. Although Glazer’s bill continues to pass through assembly committees with near-unanimous votes, support from assembly members has often been conditional.

Some lawmakers have likened the bill to Ronald Reagan’s calls, when he was California’s governor, for crackdowns on civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protesters in 1967 with new rules that would limit speech on campuses.

“SB 1287 (Glazer) would effectively constitute a policy that aligns with then-Governor Reagan’s plea to the campus Chancellor, to ‘lay down some rules of conduct for the students comparable to what we’d expect in our own families’ by curtailing the freedom of speech on campus and the freedom to assemble,” members of the assembly committee on higher education wrote in their analysis of the bill. 

Other lawmakers and opponents of the bill also said the bill was redundant and did little to add to existing law around harassment and other incidents of violence on campuses. 

Sen. Aisha Wahab, the first and only Muslim member of the state Senate, gave the sole vote in opposition to the bill in that chamber. While recognizing Glazer’s intention to protect free speech rights of all students, she raised concerns over its punitive measures. 

“What happens to that particular student?” she said on the Senate floor in May before casting her “no” vote, referring to a student who violates the provisions in the bill. “How are they affected in the academic arena? Are they going to be blacklisted? Are they allowed in the UCs?”

The post As Students Return to School, a Proposed Law Targets Campus Protests appeared first on The Intercept.

In publicizing the account, however, the university downplayed Columbia’s own role in Aghayeva’s arrest, an echo of several other incidents over the past year where international students were targeted by federal agents.

Columbia, according to an investigation by The Intercept, repeatedly failed to follow its own policies for safeguarding students from President Donald Trump’s deportation machine.

The school has long required that authorities — whether federal or local — present a judicial warrant to gain entry to school grounds. Yet a review of university documents and interviews with affected students show how, in Aghayeva’s and other cases, school staff and officials failed to demand the proper documentation.

Since at least March 5, 2025, when provost Angela Olinto emailed school deans about it, Columbia’s explicit policy has been to bar ICE agents from non-public school property. Yet, in the days following the email, federal immigration agents entered school residential buildings without a warrant at least twice.

“After what happened in Minnesota, we know that ICE is coming to our communities. It’s not surprising that they would be coming after Columbia and students,” Eli Northrup, a New York state assembly candidate whose district would include Columbia, said of ICE. “What is surprising is that every single person working in a Columbia building didn’t have it ingrained that if law enforcement comes, that’s something that needs to be thoroughly vetted.”

Members of the Columbia community, including students who have been detained by ICE, said that despite its clear policies the school has shown that it placed its priorities on matters other than defending people from immigration authorities. They pointed to the involvement of officers from Columbia’s Department of Public Safety in cracking down on campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student and protest leader who was arrested inside a Columbia residential building last March by immigration agents, said, “Columbia invested more in training Public Safety how to brutalize students, how to arrest them, rather than how to protect them.”

In response to questions, Columbia pointed The Intercept to its public statements on Aghayeva’s arrest. The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, did not respond to requests for comment.

Aghayeva’s Arrest

Last week, shortly after ICE agents arrived to arrest Aghayeva, who is Azerbaijani, acting Columbia President Claire Shipman wrote an email to the school community.

“It is important to reiterate that all law enforcement agents must have a judicial warrant or judicial subpoena to access non-public areas of the University,” she said.

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Later, after the student had been released from custody, Shipman said in a video statement that the five ICE agents did not present “any kind of warrant” and misrepresented their identities to enter the building by saying “they were police searching for a missing child.” The following day, Shipman told a university plenary that ICE was let into the property by a Columbia building attendant. Later, a university security officer arrived and asked for a warrant, Shipman said. The federal agents ignored the request.

Concerned students and faculty members questioned how such a major lapse could take place close to a year after similar lapses resulted in Columbia students being targeted by warrantless federal agents on university property.

“It was clear that this individual didn’t know what he was supposed to do,” said a professor of psychology at Columbia, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the university.

In the aftermath of Aghayeva’s arrest, Columbia announced that it will be conducting webinars for its students, faculty, and staff on “immigration policy and understanding the law.”

Given the lapses that have occurred, however, calls are growing for Columbia to train its own security personnel to do better.

Words Versus Actions

“ICE agents must have a judicial warrant or subpoena to access non-public areas,” said the March 2025 email to school deans from Olinto, the provost.

Just two days after the email was sent, on March 7, building door staff at a Columbia building allowed federal agents without a warrant to enter a university property.

“I called Public Safety the moment ICE was outside my house,” said Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian Ph.D. student and the target of the raid. “They said that they’ll file a report and told me not to open the door. And that was it.”

The incursion had come amid a battle between the Trump administration and the university over $400 million in federal funding, which the government suspended on the same day as the raid.

It was also on the same day that Khalil wrote to university authorities about the danger of ICE coming to his home. Khalil, who had been a lead negotiator for the campus protest encampments, had attracted the ire of campus pro-Israel activists, whom he said were trying to get him arrested by ICE.

“I haven’t been able to sleep,” Khalil wrote in an email at the time, “fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home. I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm.”

The university was not forthcoming with any help. The following night, Khalil was arrested by federal immigration agents from inside his university residential building. No warrant had been provided — and no beefed-up security was present.

The day after Khalil was arrested, Columbia published a brief statement that said, “There have been reports of ICE around campus. Columbia has and will continue to follow the law.”

The statement cited the university policy requiring agents to have a judicial warrant to enter non-public areas but gave no indication that authorities in the previous days twice earlier entered buildings without the warrants.

Double Standards

The university’s response to Aghayeva’s arrest stood in stark contrast to how it reacted to the detention and targeting of other Columbia students: Khalil, fellow Palestinian student protester Mohsen Mahdawi, and Yunseo Chung, a U.S. permanent resident who the Trump administration targeted after her arrest at a protest. The Trump administration pursued the three students for their pro-Palestine advocacy, according to court documents.

Following Aghayeva’s arrest, Columbia promptly notified the community and announced that additional Public Safety patrols were being deployed to its residential buildings. Shipman quickly released a statement that said, “We started work immediately to gain her release. We are so grateful for the help and support we got from the mayor and the governor.”

“[I was] happy that such help is being extended to a community member as it should have been extended to me and to others,” said Khalil. “Yet, I couldn’t ignore the discrepancy in that response and how all of these were denied to me. Until this time, Columbia hasn’t reached out to me personally to offer any kind of support.”

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Mahdawi’s arrest came after the school criticized a pro-Palestine event he had been involved in. The school initially said the demonstration included “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” Eventually, the administration said the characterization was misleading, but no clarification was issued. When the authorities came after Mahdawi, they cited the language as grounds for his arrest.

“When speech concerns Palestine, protections suddenly weaken, enforcement intensifies, and silence from leadership grows louder,” Mahdawi told The Intercept.

While the failure to stop federal agents with judicial warrants was a shortcoming of public safety, school security officials have not shied away from robust crackdowns on pro-Palestine protests.

“I believe that all of the securitization of campus exists to police the students,” said Srinivasan, the Ph.D. student targeted by ICE. “It does not actually exist to protect the students from ICE.”

On Friday, Columbia announced enhanced security measures including additional personnel around residence buildings, expanded video intercom systems, and distribution of “know your rights” printouts. The university also said that its personnel at housing buildings had received additional trainings over the past week.

It took a year, repeated security failures, and the arrest of a student unrelated to the pro-Palestine protests in any way for the measures to be announced.

People advocating for students, however, noted that Columbia already barred warrantless entry into university buildings.

“It has to be more than a policy,” said Northrup, the state assembly candidate. “It has to be executed.”

The post Columbia Flouted Its Own Policies and Let ICE Into University Buildings appeared first on The Intercept.

The arrests are part of the long arm of the crackdowns on campus protests that started in the spring and kept pace this fall. School officials had described the spray paint as “antisemitic.”

A local news clip shows a wall spray-painted with the names of Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and Haiti. A building entrance was also splashed with red paint, including handprints, with posted signs that say, “Your school funds genocide.”

The protest and its aftermath came as Case Western was facing a federal civil rights complaint alleging bias against protesters and Palestinian students. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Education opened a Title VI investigation at Case Western.

The latest arrests were part of an expansive crackdown: The school spent more than $250,000 on public safety staffing, equipment, and remediation after tearing down protest encampments, including removing signs and painting over murals on a campus “spirit wall,” according to documents reviewed by The Intercept.  (The school said it could not comment on the criminal investigation.)

Case Western issued notices of interim suspension or other warnings to students after protests in the spring and barred some graduating students from campus. Only one student, however, was suspended for the fall semester: Yousef Khalaf, president of the school’s undergraduate chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Among seven violations referenced in the notices, Khalaf faces school disciplinary allegations for engaging in intimidating behavior, including using the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” He is barred from campus until the spring of 2025.

Khalaf said he was treated differently than other protesters. His was the only case for which the school hired an outside firm, BakerHostetler, he said. He said SJP students have been contacted by school administrators for posting flyers or attending group events. (BakerHostetler and Case Western did not respond to a request for comment.)

“They don’t treat any other club this way,” Khalaf said. “We see very clearly the ‘Palestine exception’ being applied here.”

With Israel’s war on Gaza entering its second year, Khalaf is among thousands of students and faculty members still being targeted in universities’ battles over harsh protest crackdowns, free speech, academic independence, and discrimination.

The fights are playing out online, in campus quads, internal disciplinary proceedings, and in the courts. Organizers among the students and faculty say universities are retaliating against them for their activism and restricting their civil liberties and freedom of expression while claiming to uphold both.

“The university is threatening us with sanctions that could jeopardize our academic careers if we choose to speak out again.”

As campus protests reached their height in May, Dahlia Saba, a second-year Palestinian American graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote an op-ed supporting the demonstrators’ demands. She called on the school to address calls to divest from industries that profit from Israel’s war. She and her co-author Vignesh Ramachandran, another graduate student, were met with student nonacademic disciplinary investigations that relied solely on the op-ed for evidence.

“The university is threatening us with sanctions that could jeopardize our academic careers if we choose to speak out again,” Saba said. “They’re low-level sanctions to begin with, but the university is pursuing sanctions against many people on very little evidence.”

The issue is not so much the severity of the sanctions, Saba said, but using punishments to chill students’ speech. The disciplinary actions become a tool, she said, to help universities keep track of people involved in protests for Palestine.

“They are basically trying to get any sort of sanction on people’s records,” Saba said, “so that if they speak up again, if they do anything that criticizes the university’s investment policy, or if they in any way speak out in support of Palestine or in solidarity with Palestine, that students could be scared that the university could bring further charges against them that could then enact harsher consequences.”

Last month, 13 police officers stormed the home of student organizers at the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a raid on suspicion of a month-old incident of vandalism in connection to Gaza protests. Pomona College unilaterally suspended 10 students for the remainder of the academic year for allegedly participating in protests for divestment.

Schools across the country spent this summer preparing to preempt pro-Palestinian activism come fall. At a campus safety conference, more than 450 people working on the issue discussed, among other topics, “preparing for, responding to, and recovering from on-campus protests.”  

That preparation was evident as schools readied themselves last month for protests planned around the October 7 anniversary. Ahead of planned walkouts and protests across New York City, administrators at Columbia University warned the community to prepare for potential violence. The night before the walkout, Columbia University Law School told professors to call campus police on protesters.

Meanwhile, students and advocacy groups are pushing back on university administrators for their responses to protests and battling new policies governing protests and freedom of expression that they say show an anti-Palestinian bias.

The crackdown on student protests has led to a raft of court cases and federal complaints. Students at the University of California, Irvine sued the school chancellor and regents in July, saying the school had suspended protesters without due process. The school is arguing that an upcoming December court date is unnecessary because the suspensions have ended, said attorney Thomas Harvey, who is representing students. 

“The university and the state are using whatever tools they have to stop people from protesting war crimes and genocide paid for by tax dollars and invested in by their university,” Harvey said. “Their argument is effectively about the required decorum while protesting mass death and human suffering.”

Last month, prosecutors charged at least 49 people, including Irvine students and faculty, with misdemeanors for failing to vacate encampments this spring. Arraignments will continue through mid-December, and cases that go to trial won’t do so until January or February.

The San Diego City Attorney’s Office dismissed all charges against student protesters at University of California, San Diego earlier this month. Prosecutors in Irvine, however, have shown no indication that they’ll dismiss their charges, even amid pleas from Irvine Mayor Farrah N. Khan.

Harvey, the students’ attorney, said the school is fearful of losing donors.

“It’s to their benefit financially to publicly show that they are, in quotes, cracking down,” he said. Students and faculty are facing criminal charges and disciplinary conduct hearings from the school, including suspensions and probation, he said. “It’s just a climate of real crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices.” 

Similar complaints alleging discrimination against protesters and Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students were filed against Case Western and Rutgers University in New Jersey, which is under a federal civil rights investigation. (I co-teach a class at Rutgers’s New Brunswick campus.)

In September, the University of Maryland moved to cancel a protest organized by SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace after receiving complaints about the event. The group Palestine Legal and the Council on American-Islamic Relations then filed suit over the protest cancellation. (The school declined to comment and pointed to a statement from the university president.)

Last month, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction to allow the demonstration to go ahead. The suit, which claims that the university violated students’ First Amendment rights by canceling the protest, is still pending in court.

Shatha Shahin, a third-year law student at Case Western and the president of the law school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, said the university tried to make an example of Khalaf, the undergraduate SJP president.

“There is definitely a hostility in the way they’ve treated and used Yousef as this mastermind for everything that went on behind the scenes for all the Palestine advocacy,” Shahin said.

In August, Case Western began enforcing new rules governing speech and protest activity. Administrators prohibited encampments and the use of projected images, microphones, or bullhorns. Protests larger than 20 people now require approval from a committee.

“They speak with Hillel, they talk to Hillel, but they won’t even talk to these kids.”

“It’s very deliberate, and it’s very calculated,” said Maryam Assar, an Ohio attorney working with student protesters who is herself an alumnus of the School of Law at Case Western. “That’s why it’s really problematic that they’re going through all of these steps to silence them.”

Assar said the contrast between the treatment of pro-Palestinian organizers and other groups was stark.

“They speak with Hillel, they talk to Hillel,” she said, referring to the avowedly pro-Israel campus Jewish organization, “but they won’t even talk to these kids.”

While some student protesters face retaliation from administrators, others say they’ve also faced discrimination on campus. A New Jersey man was charged in April with vandalizing the Center for Islamic Life at Rutgers University–New Brunswick on Eid al-Fitr. That same month, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the New Jersey chapter of CAIR filed a federal Title VI complaint against Rutgers alleging that the school had demonstrated a pattern of bias against Muslim and Arab students.

In a statement to The Intercept, Megan Schumann, the head of public relations at Rutgers, said the school was fully cooperating with the civil rights investigation and that the university takes seriously every claim of bias.

At the school’s protest encampment in May, a counterprotester was filmed hitting a pro-Palestine student. Schumann said Rutgers University Police Department charged the man with bias intimidation, harassment, and simple assault and that the case was pending in court.

The school negotiated with students to disband campus encampments later that month. In December 2023, Rutgers–New Brunswick had suspended its chapter of SJP for a year. The club was reinstated in January, but in August, the school slapped SJP with another suspension that is expected to last until July 2025.

“The professor clearly targeted students who were evidently Muslim and violated our personal space.”

Rutgers students have also filed dozens of complaints of bias toward Arab and Muslim students from professors and other faculty. In November, student protesters disrupted a Rutgers event with Bruce Hoffman, a self-described Zionist who works as a counterterrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. A group of four Muslim students wearing hijabs who were not part of the disruption said that, after they left the event, a professor approached them. According to the student and her friends, who confirmed the story, the professor filmed them, telling them to “smile” for the camera, and accused them of ruining the event.

“She was pointing her finger in my face,” said the student, who, like her friends, asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation by the school. At least two of the students filed bias reports against the professor; a copy of one was provided to The Intercept. “The professor clearly targeted students who were evidently Muslim and violated our personal space while instigating this incident outside of the classroom which we had already left from,” she wrote. (Schumann, the Rutgers spokesperson, declined to comment on questions about specific allegations against faculty or staff.)

“This is a falsified account of the events that occurred and printing these comments about me would not only be considered defamation, but also likely rise to the level of slander,” the professor said in a statement to The Intercept. They declined to comment further.

The professor also filed a bias complaint against the students. While none of the students were found guilty of conduct violations as a result of the complaint, one was told that they were no longer eligible for a resident assistant position because of an outstanding complaint against them.

Universities have demonstrated a willingness to cave to the demands of donors to try to control free speech among students. At Case Western, Assar, the Ohio attorney, suggested such pressure was brought to bear.

“They’re really freaked out because donors are upset that this is happening,” Assar said of school administrators, “and they imagine that they can control these kids.”

When pro-Palestine students at the University of Maryland began planning their October 7 anniversary protest, the school president and other administrators initially said they would protect the group’s right to hold the protest, said Abel Amene, a fourth-year student and a board member of the school’s SJP chapter who helped organize the protest. (He is also a member of the University of Maryland student government and an elected volunteer member of D.C’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission, but did not speak in either capacity.)

“Then they began indicating that they were getting pressure through emails, through various Zionist organizations on campus and off campus, pressuring them to cancel our event,” he said.

Shortly after expressing their support for free speech, administrators proceeded to cancel the event. They said there had been “overwhelming outreach” about the protest, even while acknowledging that it posed no threat.

After the federal court order forced the school to allow the protest to proceed, Abel said, the school still took actions that restricted the demonstration. The grounds were staffed with police and non-police security, metal detectors installed, and a drone deployed over the event all day. Fencing put up by the university virtually cut the protest space in half. (In response to questions about the protest, Hafsa Siddiqi, the media relations manager for the university, pointed to an October 1 statement from school President Darryll Pines after the court ruled to let the protest proceed.)

The debacle over the protest showed the school’s bias against activists for Palestine, Abel said, and for pro-war forces, noting that University of Maryland touts its strategic partnerships with weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

“This is just part of a pattern we’ve seen,” he said, “where we are treated as threats and presumed to be a danger to students and a danger to the university.”

The repression of pro-Palestine activism on campus started well before October 7, Assar pointed out — including at her own alma mater. When Assar was a law student in 2022, Case Western President Eric Kaler denounced a student government vote to divest from companies that harm Palestinians as “naive” and antisemitic.

“He really created this atmosphere,” Assar said, “where speaking up in support of Palestinians and their right to be free from occupation or not have their homes stolen — he made that basically into, ‘You’re a problem if you speak up.’”

Years earlier, in 2017, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison condemned a vote by the student government to pass legislation calling on the school to divest from corporations involved in human rights violations, including in Israel.

“We have seen the universities respond to these demands for more democratic institutions by reacting in exactly the opposite way.”

“We have seen the universities respond to these demands for more democratic institutions by reacting in exactly the opposite way,” said Saba, the Madison graduate student, “by restricting the rights that students have on campus and by increasing how much they can punish students.”

Saba said she’s felt alienated on campus as a Palestinian American student. The school used her membership in the school’s SJP chapter as a piece of evidence in the charges against her.

“There’s been a sense on this campus for a long time that Palestinian voices are not supposed to be heard,” Saba said. “These disciplinary investigations, by punishing or penalizing students for having any affiliation with student groups that speak in solidarity with Palestinians, they’re essentially telling Palestinian students that they can’t find community on this campus.”

“Because when the environment is so oppressive, when our institutions are invested in genocide, and when our taxpayer dollars are invested in genocide, the only rational response would be to try to organize against that. But these schools are criminalizing that organizing.”

The post From Campus to the Courts, the “Palestine Exception” Rules University Crackdowns appeared first on The Intercept.

On Sunday, some current faculty members at Columbia University learned through a news article that all new students and faculty at the school will be mandated to go through an orientation on antisemitism. The plan was not announced in any direct communications from the university.

Rather, it was reported by Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in a story about the university’s task force on antisemitism.

Formed last November as political pressure mounted against criticism of Israel on campuses, the task force set out to examine specific notions of bigotry at the university, which has become a flashpoint of protests against Israel’s war on Gaza — often followed by violent police crackdowns.

The plan was not announced in any direct communications from the university. Rather, it was reported by Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Numerous participants in the antisemitism task force, including its three co-chairs — Columbia faculty members, many of whom are outspoken Israel supporters — openly discussed the not-yet published report with the newspaper before any such information was shared with the university’s community, or even their colleagues.

The antisemitism task force will release a report in the coming weeks detailing accounts from students who submitted written testimony or participated in “listening sessions,” according to Haaretz. All the anecdotes, equally, were shared without any attribution except that they were anonymously gathered by the task force — a body with pro-Israel leadership that has been controversial since its inception last November.

The article also revealed that a mandatory antisemitism orientation would be developed. The trainings will include expressions of anti-Zionism as examples of possible antisemitism, touching on a controversy that has enveloped the protests, crackdowns, and larger national conversation about Israel–Palestine.

Anecdotes that the task force shared with Haaretz include disturbing examples of antisemitism, like a professor reportedly telling a class “to avoid reading mainstream media, declaring that ‘it is owned by Jews.’”

Examples like these have been widely reported, but they are fewer and further between than the explicit and tacit conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism that pervade task force members’ comments — a conflation that has helped lead to dire consequences, including arrests, for thousands of students protesting Israel’s war.

A Dangerous Conflation

Up until this point, the chairs and participants in the antisemitism task force have demurred from offering a working definition of antisemitism. Now, with the new orientation planned, task force members now said that a definition of antisemitism will be put forward — and it will include anti-Zionism.

According to the Haaretz article, the task force’s antisemitism definition “is expected to determine that statements calling for the destruction and death of Israel and Zionism can be considered antisemitic, while criticism of the Israeli government cannot.” It mirrors, then, the contested and nationalist International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, IHRA, definition, which has been championed by Republicans and other conservative Zionists, including President Joe Biden.

“This definition is designed to inform faculty and students about what can offend Jewish people and which types of statements can cause pain and discomfort,” Haaretz reported. “An educational definition will not infringe upon freedom of speech on campus or prohibit potentially antisemitic phrases.”

Given that aggressive police raids at Columbia and Barnard, its women’s college, that saw student protesters arrested and the shutdown of the entire campus, the claim that free speech on campus will not be repressed beggars belief. Even if the only use of the definition is during mandatory orientations on antisemitism, its deployment inscribes the dangerous antisemitism/anti-Zionism conflation into campus culture. Views of Palestinians, anti-Zionist Jews, and the many others in the community who express criticism of Israel are bound to be delegitimized.

Even in their own telling to Haaretz, task force members make clear that their interest involved validating pro-Israel students’ discomfort as examples of widespread antisemitism. “We heard from students who feel their identity, values and very existence on campus have been under attack,” said task force co-chair and political science professor Ester Fuchs.

There can be no doubt, as I’ve previously noted, that students for whom Israel is central to their Jewish identity have felt immense discomfort in the months of protests against Israel’s violence. This discomfort is not, however, proof of real threat. Nor is it grounds to continue to uphold the dangerous claim that criticism of Israel, even criticism of Israel as an ethno-state, is an attack against Jewish people.

All professors at universities nationwide should be committed to all of our students’ safety and well-being; this does not mean we must accept all feelings of fear and discomfort as legitimately grounded in persecution and oppression.

A definition of antisemitism, even for purely educational purposes, that insists on defending Israel as an ethno-state will only serve to further silence Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices, while rendering real cases of antisemitism — Jewish people targeted for being Jewish — harder to target and fight.

We would not, for instance, validate the fears of a white student brought up to see Black people as a threat — an important counterfactual, given a particularly striking comment by task force member Gil Zussman, an Israeli electrical engineering professor, about the Black Lives Matter movement.

“If, for example, a student group were to use an abhorrent chant such as ‘We don’t want BLM supporters here,’ there would be immediate consequences,” Zussman told Haaretz. “However, chants such as ‘We don’t want Zionists here’ have been normalized and currently have no consequences. These double standards are unacceptable and will eventually fracture the university.”

The idea that the standards should be the same — that support for an ethno-state should be as protected as efforts to end anti-Black racism — reveals exactly the problem with the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism: a troubling conflation of nation-state ideology with racial identity.

A Controversial Task Force

Since its formation last year, numerous students and faculty members expressed concerns about the antisemitism task force’s makeup, methodology, and purview.

“Ever since the task force was announced, we feared it would equate Zionism and Jewishness,” wrote four Jewish graduate students, all critical of Zionism, in an op-ed for the Columbia Spectator last week. “All three co-chairs of the task force — Ester R. Fuchs, Nicholas Lemann, and David M. Schizer — are members of the Academic Engagement Network, a Zionist advocacy organization, and the three of them penned a statement supporting Columbia’s ties to Israel.”

Columbia law professor Katherine Franke, writing in The Nation in April, noted that the task force is “chaired by among the most ardent Zionist faculty members on our campus” and that “none of its members has any academic expertise in the study of antisemitism, or in how antidiscrimination laws apply in an academic setting.” (Franke was among the five Columbia faculty members maligned by university President Minouche Shafik in Congress for their Israel-critical positions.)

The antisemitism task force itself published an op-ed in the Spectator under a shared byline last month. The text was riddled with claims indicating the body’s readiness to conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism. “Zionism literally means the venerable movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland,” the task force wrote, “but in many settings on campus it has become a less well-defined general-purpose accusation.”

Zionism — literally, practically, and historically — is by no means reducible to this rosy abstraction. While the group for months refused to give a clear definition of antisemitism, it was willing to offer a simple and reductive definition of Zionism — one that ignores that political, nation-state ideology’s unbroken history of Palestinian exile, oppression, and occupation.

In February, LitHub published an email exchange between task force co-chair Nicholas Lemann, a professor of journalism and film, and the celebrated filmmaker James Schamus. Schamus continuously urges Lemann to be transparent about the task force’s working definition of antisemitism, expressing concern over the task force’s pro-Israel bias.

Demands like Schamus’s for the task force to give a definition of antisemitism don’t presume a clear and simple definition of antisemitism. Instead, they ask for recognition that discrimination and bigotry are context-dependent and that definitions can’t be relied upon in every case.

The concern is that, all too often, anti-Zionism is treated as antisemitism.

Unacceptable on Campus

In remarks to the Israeli paper, task force members themselves the task force members seemed to acknowledge that felt experiences of antisemitism related to opposition to the ideology of Zionism.

“The concept of Zionism has become unacceptable in some circles at Columbia,” Lemann, the co-chair, told Haaretz. “People are asked to promise that they’re not Zionist.”

For many Jewish people, including the many thousands of us worldwide who have taken part in Palestine solidarity protests and campus encampments, the growing opposition to Zionism is not an attack on Jewish people but an overdue challenge to an oppressive, nationalist worldview.

The task force wants it both ways: to themselves insist upon the identification of Zionism with Jewishness, and then to call the identification itself antisemitic.

“Zionism is a political ideology — not an ethnic or religious identity,” wrote the Jewish graduate students in their Columbia Spectator open letter to the task force. “We can attest to that fact: Some of us believed in Zionism when we were younger, and even wanted to enlist in the Israeli military. Some of us grew up feeling like Zionism and Jewishness were inseparable, but our study of the history of Zionism led us to reject it.”

The task force wants it both ways: to themselves insist upon the identification of Zionism with Jewishness, and then to call the identification itself antisemitic. It is, in short, a trap.

When it comes to views deemed “unacceptable” on campus, meanwhile, it was Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace — two pro-Palestine organizations — that Columbia banned from campus last November. Over 100 students engaging in peaceful Palestine solidarity protests were arrested in April, with many suspended and, in the case of Barnard students, kicked out of their campus housing. It was Palestinian students and their supporters who were sprayed with noxious chemicals by two former members of the Israeli military on campus.

It was also, as I witnessed firsthand, young Palestinian and other Arab women students who were met at their campus gates by a crowd of middle-aged men and women wrapped in Israeli flags, screaming that the students should “go get raped” in Gaza. It is professors who have criticized Israel and supported Palestinians who were then smeared in Congress. Yet it is only in service of a perverted definition of antisemitism that there will be mandatory orientations.

“To be Muslim at Columbia is to be racially profiled and doxxed, beg for administrative resources and support, and still receive none,” wrote Noreen Mayat, a recent Barnard graduate and former president of the school’s Muslim Students Association, in the Columbia Spectator in May. “To be Muslim at Columbia is to face Islamophobia on campus — to be spat on and called ‘terrorists’ — and receive no University acknowledgment or recognition.”

In the Haaretz article, the antisemitism task force’s apparent prioritization of pro-Israel student experiences shields itself from critique by calling for a space of open discussion, when only one line of discourse will be institutionally sanctioned.

“Part of what a great university does is introduce us to people with different opinions,” David Schizer, Columbia law school professor and task force co-chair, said.

It’s a rich comment from the self-identifying conservative who went out of his way to see pro-Palestine colleagues censured and peaceful protests shuttered. It was in this very vein that the task force has operated from the jump: exploratory, but with only one possible focus and thus one possible conclusion.

“The priority has always been the comfort of students other than us,” Mayat, the Barnard graduate, wrote. “The priority has always been the safety of others, at the expense of ours.”

The post Columbia Task Force for Dealing With Campus Protests Declares That Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism appeared first on The Intercept.

While Rubio and the Trump administration claimed in public that they wanted to deport students including Mahmoud Khalil and Yunseo Chung for supporting terrorism, internal Department of Homeland Security and State Department documents instead cite their advocacy for Palestinian rights in protests and writings — activities protected by the First Amendment.

Rubio and the administration have repeatedly conflated pro-Palestinian speech with support for Hamas, which the U.S. designates as a terrorist organization, but a DHS memo shows the government did not find any evidence that Chung or Khalil provided “material support” — meaning cash payment, property, or services — to any terror group. Even in their own communications, DHS and the State Department acknowledged they were in uncharted territory and likely to face backlash.

“DHS has not identified any alternative grounds of removability that would be applicable to Chung and Khalil, including the ground of removability for aliens who have provided material support to a foreign terrorist organization or terrorist activity,” reads the March 8 memo. “We are not aware of any prior exercises of the Secretary’s removal authority in [the Immigration and Nationality Act] section 237(a)(4)(c), and given their [lawful permanent resident] status, Chung and Khalil are likely to challenge their removal under this authority, and courts may scrutinize the basis for these determinations.”

Yet the following day, Rubio claimed that Khalil and the other students were supporting terrorist organizations. “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported,” wrote Rubio on X on March 9, referencing Khalil’s arrest.

The hundreds of pages of documents were evidence in a lawsuit brought against President Donald Trump, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and DHS by five students and academics — Rümeysa Öztürk, Badar Khan Suri, Mohsen Mahdawi, Khalil, and Chung — who alleged that their deportation orders violated their freedom of expression. 

The students won their case last year, but until Thursday, the trove of documents remained under lock and key after the judge agreed to seal the records on the State Department’s behalf. At the request of The Intercept, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, Massachusetts District Judge William G. Young ultimately unsealed the records, revealing intimate details about the State Department’s persecution of students speaking out in support of Palestine.

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The documents include a series of memos sent from the Department of Homeland Security to the State Department recommending deportation orders for the five students. The correspondence overwhelmingly focuses on the students’ participation in on campus protests and advocacy.

In the memos, commissioned by Rubio, the State Department and DHS argued that the students posed a threat to U.S. foreign policy because the protests they participated in fostered a “hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States” and undermined “U.S policy to combat anti-semitism around the world.” DHS and the State Department repeatedly based accusations of antisemitism and supporting terrorism on the students’ public speech, often noting that the First Amendment could make it difficult for the U.S. to win their deportation cases.

In Öztürk’s case, a State Department document dated March 21, 2025, noted that her visa had been revoked because she “had been involved in associations that ‘may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students indicating support for a designated terrorist organization’ including co-authoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later banned from campus.”

A separate document from the State Department dated March 15, referencing an assessment from DHS, found that Suri was “actively supporting Hamas terrorism” and “actively spreads its propaganda,” based on Facebook posts.

However, the State Department memo cautioned that Suri was likely to challenge his removal on First Amendment grounds. “Given the reliance on Suri’s public statements as an academic, and the potential that a court may consider his actions inextricably tied to speech protected under the First Amendment, it is likely that courts will closely scrutinize the basis for this determination,” officials wrote. 

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While the students won their lawsuit against the government, an appeals court earlier this month reversed the decision that released Khalil from custody. He still has time to appeal the reversal before he can legally be detained, but the White House has said the government plans to rearrest him and deport him to Algeria.

The State Department did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment by the time of publication.

The post New Legal Documents Show Marco Rubio Targeted Students for Op-Eds and Protesting appeared first on The Intercept.

Last month, student protesters at University of California, Irvine sued the school regents and chancellor for suspending them without any notice or a chance to present evidence in their defense. On Tuesday, plaintiffs in the suit filed a motion to ask the Superior Court of California to step in.

The five students are asking the court to force the school to halt the suspensions and allow students to resume their studies, register for fall classes, go back to campus jobs, and regain access to campus housing.

More than 3,000 people were arrested during brutal police crackdowns on campus protests this year, according to a protest tracker developed by The Appeal. UCI is still an outlier — it’s one of the only schools in the country that issued interim suspensions banning students from campus before they had a chance to respond. The university’s approach was, a representative for the students said, unprecedented. 

“That’s outrageous — that’s not how due process is supposed to work.”

“That’s outrageous — that’s not how due process is supposed to work,” said Thomas Harvey, an attorney representing the students in the suit. “They seem to be punishing our clients with a method that not only is unprecedented in UCI’s use in terms of responses to protests or student conduct issues, but also it stands out as unusual among the entire UC system.” 

Tom Vasich, a spokesperson for UCI, said, “The university does not comment on lawsuits.”

At least two of the students were prohibited from graduating in the spring because of the suspensions. They will eventually have to take and pay for another semester of classes but are still barred from registering for courses for the upcoming fall semester. 

The UCI chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine also received an interim suspension. SJP chapters at schools around the country have been targeted under bans and suspensions in crackdowns on campus protests. SJP at UCI was also told as a result of the suspension that the club could not post on their own Instagram page. 

Students suspended at UCI this spring received notices from the school that listed no specific allegations against them but said they were present at protests where the school claimed that violations of campus policy had allegedly occurred.

The students said they were not given an opportunity to have a hearing on the claims against them or to present evidence in their defense before the suspension went into effect. Students who received the suspension notices were told that they could not attend classes in person or online, access student housing, or be on campus at all, effective immediately. 

Interim suspensions have never been used in this way at UCI or at any other schools in the UC system, said Harvey, the plaintiffs’ attorney. 

“You think about the draconian ways they cracked down on dissent at UCLA, and UCLA still hasn’t used interim suspensions to punish their students,” he said. “They’re not saying, ‘You can’t come on campus indefinitely until we resolve your student conduct hearing,’” he added. “They’re not issuing the punishment in advance of the hearing, which is what they’re doing at UCI.” 

Students are hurting emotionally, financially, and otherwise. But the suspensions haven’t discouraged them from speaking out against the war on Gaza. 

“This is nothing but a scare tactic to intimidate and shake our resolve,” one of the student plaintiffs, who requested anonymity to avoid reprisals, told The Intercept. “The university hopes to shift our attention away from our demands for divestment. But these suspensions are not going to deter us from fighting for the liberation of Palestine. If anything, it’s strengthening our resolve.” 

No Due Process

When a student at UCI is accused of violating school policy, they go through a student conduct process before any kind of punishment is meted out. 

In this case, however, students were punished with interim suspensions before any evidence against them was presented, according to Harvey and another faculty member who supported the students. None of the suspended students have yet been adjudicated to have violated any student conduct rules. That decision is pending and will be made at the resolution of ongoing student conduct processes. While that proceeds, the students are stuck in limbo. 

Students who received suspensions notices were notified that they could appeal their suspensions by setting up a meeting with a school administrator. Students met with the chancellor to appeal their suspensions but were not presented with specific evidence against them, according to Harvey and two members of the UCI faculty who spoke to The Intercept. After the meetings, the vice chancellor issued decision letters upholding their suspensions. 

Students were told they’d get an update on the process at the beginning of the summer, but said they have not gotten any information on where the process stands. 

The UCI faculty senate and graduate student body have sent signals to the administration that their treatment of student protesters is unacceptable. In June, the UCI Associated Graduate Students passed a vote of no confidence against the chancellor.

School faculty also proposed a resolution to censure the chancellor for calling 22 different law enforcement agencies to confront students during protests, which violates UC policies on what circumstances justify calling in outside police. 

The resolution narrowly failed, but another motion to launch an independent investigation of the handling of the police response did pass. And a motion criticizing how the administration has handled interim student suspensions, demanding an investigation into the suspension process, and calling for the suspensions to be lifted also passed.

“The suspensions happened immediately and it was without any due process. In my view, the chancellor clearly violated UCI procedures and UC procedures,” said Cecelia Lynch, a professor of political science at UCI who is part of an ad hoc faculty group, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, that organized after October 7 to support students facing disciplinary action for participating in peaceful campus protests. “The students however, had no due process and were all charged in the student conduct hearing with the same evidence — were all given the same evidence — which is not according to procedure.”

“I would just draw attention to that irony,” she said, “of the chancellor not taking any responsibility and not having any punitive action against him. But the students have already had severe punitive action, including being made homeless temporarily. And now they’re facing additional charges as well as potentially criminal charges. So it is quite a contrast in terms of accountability.”

“Almost all of the UCs have reacted badly and several of them extremely violently. Our campus was apparently the worst, unfortunately.”

Hundreds of faculty members attended three meetings that each spanned more than two hours. There was widespread disagreement about the encampments and the school’s response. However, faculty were aligned in their concerns about the ramifications for speech on campus and transparency of the administration’s decisions, said Annie McClanahan, associate professor of English, chair of the Irvine Faculty Association, and part of FSJP.

“On the interim suspensions and the issue of the student conduct process, there was really near unanimous agreement,” she said, citing agreement with an ACLU of Southern California amicus brief in support of the students on Wednesday.

While none of the UC schools handled the protests well, said Lynch, UCI’s response has been particularly noteworthy. “Almost all of the UCs have reacted badly and several of them extremely violently,” she said. “Our campus was apparently the worst, unfortunately.”

History of Crackdowns

UCI has a history of cracking down on protests, including the Irvine 11, a group of students who interrupted a campus speech by the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. in 2010. The students were arrested and later charged and convicted of conspiracy to disrupt a public meeting. 

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The school has also tried to break up other protests, including those in solidarity with the United Auto Workers strike. UCI’s treatment of protests in support of Palestine, however, stands out for its brutality, the suspended student said. 

“We’ve seen student encampments happen throughout history as well, and it’s always been in the form of anti-war and it’s always been pro-people. And it’s always been challenging the university as an imperialist institution. Particularly with the UC system, we’re seeing a mass militarization across all the UCs,” they said. “It’s in particular because this is so pro-Palestine. And in terms of UCI history, this is not the first time they’ve done something like this to repress student voices speaking up for Palestine.”

Student protesters expected this kind of crackdown and haven’t been distracted from their goal, they said. 

“All the students did not go into the encampments thinking they would be safe from the university,” the student told The Intercept. “They understood that whatever we face, it’s nothing compared to what Palestinians are facing on the ground.”

The post Student Protesters Were Suspended With No Chance to Defend Themselves. Will Courts Return Them to Campus? appeared first on The Intercept.

The findings come as MIT administrators are under growing pressure for censuring student publications criticizing MIT’s research and advocating for Palestinian human rights. The school has also faced criticism for barring student protesters from campus.

The report was published last month by the MIT Coalition for Palestine, which represents 19 student and faculty groups on campus, including MIT Divest, MIT Jews for Collective Liberation, and MIT Faculty and Staff for Palestine.

Coalition members used the university’s internal grant-tracking software to obtain granular new details about projects that have received Israeli military funding. Among the projects were partnerships to research underwater surveillance, missile detection, and drone algorithms.

“MIT has engaged in a sustained and organized campaign of disinformation and propaganda.”

After the student organizers began further probing grant information, the school took away access to the grant software used for the coalition’s research, said Rich Solomon, a member and MIT graduate student who worked on the report.

“MIT has engaged in a sustained and organized campaign of disinformation and propaganda in order to silence and suppress this information,” Solomon told The Intercept.

The new report also details the extent of MIT’s partnerships with Israeli military contractors like Elbit Systems, which supplies 85 percent of Israel’s killer drones, and Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, that has sent millions of pounds of military goods to Israel since the start of the war on Gaza. The Israeli military also sponsored several of the MIT projects with funds provided by the U.S. Defense Department.

MIT spokesperson Sarah McDonnell did not respond to specific questions about the report but pointed to statements from the school’s president, provost, and chancellor condemning “harassment, intimidation and targeting” of specific professors and their research.

“We respect that there are a range of views across that group on any number of topics, and as a general practice our office does not comment to the media about the individually held and freely expressed views of particular students or alumni,” McDonnell said in a statement to The Intercept. “MIT and its leadership are committed to promoting student well-being, protecting free speech, and responding to policy violations as appropriate.”

Protests against the war on Gaza started on MIT’s campus in late 2023 — part of the wave of nationwide campus demonstrations about Israel’s assault. MIT leadership has since resisted overwhelming calls from students and faculty to divest from research that supports what critics say is Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

At least 10 MIT students were arrested after protests in May, and several others were suspended and barred from campus, losing access to housing and campus meal plans. In October, the school banned the distribution of a student-run zine supporting Palestine.

In responses to frequently asked questions posted in May, the office of MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles said only three contracts with the Israeli military are currently active, totaling $180,000.

Solomon, the graduate student, said MIT administrators have tried to suppress the coalition’s new findings.

A campus newspaper retracted an article about the report earlier this month; its op-ed section has since been suspended until further notice. The paper’s editorial team said it had retracted the article — an examination of MIT professor Daniela Rus’s Israeli-funded research that was originally published on November 7 — after deliberation with its executive committee and faculty advisers.

McDonnell, the MIT spokesperson, said that the publication, The Tech, is editorially and financially independent from the school and that MIT had no role in the decision to temporarily suspend the publication’s opinion page or remove the article. Rus did not respond to a request for comment.

“Our decision was made in light of increasing hostile rhetoric and action against Professor Daniela Rus and her laboratory,” publisher Ellie Montemayor wrote in an addendum to the article December 9.

“Our piece detailed how Prof. Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, uses Israeli Ministry of Defense money to develop algorithms with applications in ‘multirobot security defense and surveillance,’” the authors wrote in a post on the news site Mondoweiss. “Rather than engage with these publicly verifiable facts, the Tech’s editorial board (under consultation with Prof. Rus) retracted our op-ed.”

Israeli-Funded Research

“Autonomous Robotic Swarms: Distributed Coordination and Perception” and “Terahertz Quantum-Cascade Lasers and Imaging” — these are just two of the projects funded by the Israeli military at MIT research labs cited in the new report.

MIT’s research ties to Israel have been a focus of campus protests over the last two years. But the new report underscores the extent of the school’s collaboration with major military contractors like Maersk and Elbit, as well as the potential applications of the school’s research to Israel’s most recent military operations in Gaza.

One lab explored underwater monitoring and autonomous docking technologies that could help Israel police its sea blockade of the coastal Gaza Strip. Then there was the MIT project focused on drone swarms, including armed quadcopters powered by artificial intelligence, which can mimic the sounds of women and children in distress. Israel has reportedly used the technology to lure and kill people in Gaza.

“An ethical scientist and an ethical institution pursue scientific avenues that affirm life, that help repair the world, and that refuse to allow abusive militaries to launder their reputations while they commit mass murder,” the report’s authors wrote.

MIT also has partnerships with multinational corporations whose work helps supply Israel with weapons and equipment to carry out its occupation of Palestine — firms like Elbit Systems, Maersk, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, and others. Raytheon, which started at MIT and has an active partnership with the school to place students at the company, supplies Israel with missiles and bombs. MIT also partners with other major U.S. companies that supply the Israeli military with weapons, research, and cloud computing services like Boeing, Aurora Flight Sciences, Google, and Amazon.

“These collaborations grant genocide profiteers privileged access to MIT talent and expertise,” the authors wrote.

Cutting off research partnerships with Israel emerged as a core demand of campus protests this spring. In March, 63 percent of undergraduate students voted for a referendum calling on the student union to advocate for a ceasefire in Gaza — one of the highest-turnout elections in the school’s history. In April, members of the MIT Graduate Student Union, UE Local 256, overwhelmingly adopted a resolution calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and demanding that the university cut all research ties with the Israeli military.

The MIT Chancellor Office said that negotiations with students fell short because they hinged on the demand that MIT cut funding ties with the Israeli military. “There are a number of compelling reasons not to unilaterally terminate active research agreements made by individual PIs” — principle investigators — “in compliance with law and policy,” the chancellor’s office explained in the FAQ section on student protests.

MIT has cut ties with other international actors in cases where there are concerns that the university’s research could legitimize or exacerbate abuses of human and civil rights. The school ended partnerships with Saudi Aramco in 2020, for instance, after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. MIT also conducts elevated risk assessments for projects funded by people or organizations in Saudi Arabia and China to address concerns about legitimizing or furthering violations of human and civil rights.

A 2022 report on the university’s engagement with China recommended that MIT not enter into “collaborations that might contribute to human rights abuses by foreign governments against their own citizens.” The report listed circumstances that would disqualify a Chinese company from partnering with MIT, including any direct involvement in government intelligence activities, armed forces, or other services with military applications.

“MIT’s research ties with the Israeli government similarly contribute to elevating the latter’s reputation despite its ongoing crimes against humanity,” the report said. “Why should MIT engage in research sponsorships with the Israeli government at all given the scale of its human rights abuses in Palestine?”

The post MIT Shuts Down Internal Grant Database After It Was Used to Research School’s Israel Ties appeared first on The Intercept.

Internal Los Angeles Police Department emails obtained via public records request show city police used Dataminr to track Gaza-related demonstrations and other constitutionally protected speech. The department receives real-time alerts from Dataminr not only about protests in progress, but also warnings of upcoming demonstrations as well. Police were tipped off about protests in the Los Angeles area and across the country. On at least one occasion, the emails show a Dataminr employee contacted the LAPD directly to inform officers of a protest being planned that apparently hadn’t been picked up by the company’s automated scanning.

Based on the records obtained by The Intercept, which span October 2023 to April 2024, Dataminr alerted the LAPD of more than 50 different protests, including at least a dozen before they occurred.

It’s unclear whether the LAPD used any of these notifications to inform its response to the wave of pro-Palestine protests that spread across Southern California over the last two years, which have resulted in hundreds of arrests.

Neither the LAPD nor Dataminr responded to a request for comment.

Privacy and civil liberties experts argue that police surveillance of First Amendment activity from afar has chilling effect on political association, discourse and dissent.

“Police departments are surveilling protests which are First Amendment protected political activity about a matter of public importance,” Jennifer Granick, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told The Intercept. “They are using taxpayer money to enlist companies to conduct this surveillance on social media. This is especially worrisome now that the Administration is targeting Gaza protesters for arrest and deportation based on protected activity.”

The alerts began pouring in on October 9, when Dataminr flagged a “Protest mentioning Israel” blocking traffic in Beverly Hills, citing a tweet. Over the course of the month, Dataminr tipped off the LAPD to six different protests against the war across Los Angeles. These alerts included information about protests already in progress and information about the time and place of at least one LA protest planned for a future date.

Emails produced by the LAPD in response to The Intercept’s records request show that along with its regular feed of information about constitutionally protected speech, it also provides the department with alerts curated through feeds with titles like “Domestic Demonstrations Awareness,” “LA demonstrations,” “LA unrest,” and “demonstrations,” indicating the department proactively monitors First Amendment gatherings using the platform.

The department also began receiving a regular flow of alerts about protests thousands of miles away, including a “protest mentioning Palestinian territories outside the Consulate General of Israel” in Chicago,” and tweets from journalist Talia Jane, who was providing real-time updates on an antiwar rally in New York City.

Jane told The Intercept that she objects to the monitoring of her reporting by police, and also said Dataminr’s summary of her posts were at times inaccurate. In one instance, she says, Dataminr attributed a Manhattan road closure to protesters, when it had in fact been closed by the NYPD. “It’s absurd any agency would spend money on a service that is apparently completely incapable of parsing information correctly,” she said, adding that “the surveillance of journalists’ social media to suppress First Amendment activity is exactly why members of the press have a responsibility to ensure their work is not used to harm people.”

On October 17, Dataminr sent an “urgent update” to the department warning of a “Demonstration mentioning Palestinian territories planned for today at 17:00 in Rittenhouse Square area of Philadelphia,” based on a tweet. Three days later, a similar update noted another “Demonstration mentioning Palestinian territories” planned for Boston’s Copley Square. Another warned of a “protest mentioning Palestinian territories” in the planning stages at the Oregon State Capitol. It’s unclear if the department intended to cast such a wide net, or if the out-of-state protest alerts were sent in error. Dataminr’s threat notifications are known to turn up false positives; multiple tweets by angry Taylor Swift fans aimed at Ticketmaster were forwarded to the LAPD as “L.A. Threats and Disruptions,” the records show.

Materials obtained by The Intercept also show that despite Dataminr’s marketing claims of being an “AI” intermediary between public data and customers, the firm has put its human fingers on the scales. On October 12, a Dataminr account manager emailed three LAPD officers, whose names are redacted, with the subject line “FYSA,” military shorthand meaning “for your situational awareness.” The email informed the officers of a “Protest planned for October 14 at 12:30 at Consulate General of Israel in Los Angeles,” with a link to a tweet by a Los Angeles university professor. It’s unclear if the LAPD has requested these manual tip-offs from Dataminr, or whether such personal service is routine; Dataminr did not respond when asked if it was a standard practice. But the hands-on approach undercuts Dataminr’s prior claims that it just passively provides alerts to customers about social media speech germane to their interests.

A company spokesperson previously told The Intercept that “Every First Alert user has access to the exact same alerts and can choose to receive the alerts most relevant to them.””

Dataminr pitches its clients across the private and public sector a social media superpower: What if you had immediate access tweet relevant to your interests — without having to even conduct a search? The company, founded in 2016 and valued at over $4 billion, claims a wide variety of customers, from media newsrooms to government agencies, including lucrative federal contracts with the Department of Defense. It has also found an avid customer base in law enforcement. While its direct access to Twitter has been a primary selling point, Dataminr also scours apps like Snap and Telegram.

The company — which boasts both Twitter and the CIA as early investors — pitches its “First Alert” software platform as a public safety-oriented newsfeed of breaking events.

It has for years defended its police work as simply news reporting, arguing it can’t be considered a surveillance tool because the information relayed to police is public and differs in no way from what an ordinary user browsing social media could access.

Privacy advocates and civil libertarians have countered that the software provides the government with visibility that far surpasses what any individual user or even team of human officers could accomplish. Indeed, Dataminr’s own law enforcement marketing materials claim “30k people working 24/7 would only process 1% of all the data Dataminr ingests each day.” 

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The company has this power because of its long-standing “official partner” status with both Twitter and now X. Dataminr purchases access to the platform’s data “firehose,” allowing it to query every single post and scan them on behalf of clients in real-time.

Previous reporting by The Intercept has shown Dataminr has used this privileged access to surveil abortion rights rallies, Black Lives Matter protests, and other constitutionally protected speech on behalf of both local and federal police. Dataminr sources told The Intercept in 2020 how the company’s human analysts, helping tailor the service to its various police and military customers, at time demonstrated implicit biases in their work — an allegation the company denied.

In its previous incarnation as Twitter before its purchase by Elon Musk, and today as X, the social media platform for years expressly prohibited third parties from using its user data for “monitoring sensitive events (including but not limited to protests, rallies, or community organizing meetings),” per its terms of service. Both companies have previously claimed that Dataminr’s service by definition cannot be considered surveillance because it is applied against public discourse; critics have often pointed out that while posts are technically public, only a company with data access as powerful as Dataminr’s would ever be able to find and flag all of these specific posts amid hundreds of millions of others. Neither company has directly addressed how Dataminr’s monitoring of protests is compatible with Twitter and X’s explicit prohibition against monitoring protests.

Neither X nor Dataminr responded when asked about this contradiction.

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While Dataminr’s monitoring of campus protests began before the second Trump administration, it has taken on greater significance now given the White House’s overt attempts to criminalize speech critical of Israel and the war in Gaza. Earlier this month, former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, who helped organize Columbia University’s student protests against the war, was abruptly arrested and jailed by plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. The State Department and White House quickly confirmed the arrest was a function of Khalil’s antiwar protest efforts, which the administration has described without evidence or explanation as “aligned to Hamas.” The White House has pledged to arrest and deport more individuals who have taken part in similar campus protests against the war.

Civil libertarians have long objected to dragnet monitoring of political speech on the grounds that it will have a chilling effect on speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. While fires, shootings, and natural disasters are of obvious interest to police, these critics frequently argue that if people know their tweets are subject to police scrutiny without any evidence of wrongdoing, they may tend to self-censor. 

“Political action supporting any kind of government-disfavored viewpoint could be subject to the same over-policing: gun rights, animal rights, climate change are just a few examples,” the ACLU’s Granick added. “Law enforcement should leave online organizing alone.”

The post LAPD Surveilled Gaza Protests Using This Social Media Tool appeared first on The Intercept.

“When someone tells you they are aiding and abetting terrorists — believe them.” That’s the opening line the suit filed Wednesday against the Palestinian advocacy groups American Muslims for Palestine and National Students for Justice in Palestine, the umbrella group supporting student organizers for Palestine, which supports more than 350 Palestine solidarity groups, including more than 200 campus organizations across the country.

The lawsuit is part of a nationwide crackdown on pro-Palestine activism, especially on campus. It was filed a day after police in New York City deployed militarized forces to remove students from campus encampments protesting the war on Gaza and arrested hundreds.

Some or all of the nine plaintiffs in the suit are involved in a raft of other civil suits related to the October 7 attacks. Among the defendants they’ve pursued in court are major media organizations and United Nations agencies.

The survivors of the October 7 attack alleged that American Muslims for Palestine “serves as Hamas’s propaganda division in the United States.” 

“Through NSJP, AMP uses propaganda to intimidate, convince, and recruit uninformed, misguided, and impressionable college students to serve as foot soldiers for Hamas on campus and beyond,” the October 7 survivors wrote in their suit.

The lawsuits rely on anti-terrorism laws that made it possible to bring civil cases for acts of international terrorism, including provisions around bans on material support to terrorism that have long been controversially applied. At the time of their passage, members of Congress who pushed the anti-terror laws linked them directly to crackdowns on pro-Palestine activities, according to a recent white paper from the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal.

“For years, CCR and others have been warning of the abuse of broad ‘material support’ laws to shrink the space for Palestinian rights,” said Diala Shamas, staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The group represented another Palestinian rights organization in what Shamas said was “years-long, meritless litigation” brought by the Jewish National Fund, a group that funds Israeli settlements.

“The law’s provision of civil damages means that private actors — including those with seemingly endless resources — can bog you down in costly and distracting litigation,” Shamas said. “This means that Palestinians and those who support their rights become ‘high risk’ — and those who they rely on — charities, funders, banks or social media companies — are chilled from further engagement. The goal is to isolate Palestinians.”

Four Survivor Lawsuits

The nine plaintiffs include six survivors of the October 7 Hamas attacks. Five people attended the Supernova music festival, and another was attacked at Zikim Beach, where 19 civilians were killed as Hamas militants tried to overrun nearby military outposts.

Two other plaintiffs who were not home on October 7 had homes in Kibbutz Holit, the site of additional Hamas attacks. Another plaintiff’s brother was killed at the festival. (Lawyers for the plaintiffs, AMP, and SJP did not respond to requests for comment.)

The AMP suit is the fourth federal suit filed this year by members of the group.

Last month, eight of the same plaintiffs sued the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, claiming that it gave material support to Hamas by allowing the militant group to fundraise on the platform. In November, the Treasury Department said Hamas and “a range of illicit actors” had used Binance to funnel money to their groups. Binance lawyers asked for an extension to reply to the complaint and have until August to do so. In April, the company’s former chief executive was sentenced to four months in prison after pleading guilty to money laundering violations.

Five of the plaintiffs in the American Muslims for Palestine suit also sued the news agency The Associated Press in February. The plaintiffs alleged that the AP used photographs from “known Hamas associates who were gleefully embedded with the Hamas terrorists during the October 7th attacks.” Lawyers for the AP moved to dismiss the complaint for failing to state a claim and asked to stay discovery pending adjudication of the motion to dismiss.

In March, the same group of nine plus another October 7 survivor sued the U.S. committee of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNWRA, the largest humanitarian organization operating in Gaza. The suit against UNRWA claims that the group “financed and aided” Hamas, a frequent refrain from Israeli officials that has gone unsubstantiated, according to an independent review released in April. UNRWA lawyers were granted an extension and have until May 28 to respond to the complaint.

Following Israeli officials’ allegations, major donors initially cut funding to UNRWA, but later reversed the decisions — except for the United States, the group’s biggest donor, where Congress blocked funding as part of the budget package approved this spring.

The major corporate law firm Greenberg Traurig has taken on the latest case. The National Jewish Advocacy Center has taken on the three other cases. The group did not respond to a request for comment. 

Crackdown on Student Groups

Student advocates for Palestine have faced concerted and sometimes violent crackdowns by school administrators and police. Mainstream media outlets uncritically repeat unsubstantiated claims that they support Hamas.

Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, which are at the center of much campus organizing, have faced harsh censorship since October. The group was singled out in congressional hearings that have pressured university administrators to further crack down on Palestinian advocacy on campus.

Columbia University suspended its SJP chapter and its chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace in November. The New York Civil Liberties Union and Palestine Legal sued the university over the suspension in March in the New York Supreme Court. The case is pending.

American University placed its SJP chapter on probation in April after the group held a silent indoor demonstration; the school banned indoor protests in January. Rutgers University suspended the SJP chapter on its New Brunswick campus in December and claimed that the group had protested in “nonpublic forums” and caused disruption on campus; the suspension was lifted in January. (I am a co-teacher of a class at Rutgers.)

George Washington University suspended its SJP chapter in November after the group projected statements onto a library building calling for the university to divest from Israel. The projected images said GWU had blood on its hands and used the phrase “Glory to our martyrs,” a cultural reference to any Palestinian killed by Israel that was interpreted by outsiders as an endorsement of Hamas.

Brandeis was the first private university to ban its SJP chapter in November, claiming that the group “openly supports Hamas.”

State-level Republican officials have also taken steps to legalize the suppression of SJP. In March, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order targeting campus activism, calling on all the state’s higher education institutions to “review and update free speech policies” to address antisemitism. The order defined the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as antisemitic and linked the use of the widely adopted phrase to Hamas.

And in October, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered colleges to shut down all SJP chapters. The University of Florida SJP chapter sued DeSantis in November and said the governor’s order was a violation of free speech. A federal court denied the chapter’s request for a preliminary injunction in January and found that Florida officials did not intend to deactivate all SJP chapters after comments by the Florida University System chancellor walking back DeSantis’s order.

In October, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares opened an investigation into AMP and said his office had reason to believe that the organization was soliciting contributions without proper registration. Miyares, a Republican, had also called on state law enforcement agencies to donate tactical gear to Israeli citizens.

Last week, Congress adopted a resolution that would further chill speech from organizations like SJP. The resolution employs a controversial definition of antisemitism that includes any attempts to draw comparisons between the actions of the Israeli government and Nazis. The House voted 320 to 91 to adopt the working definition of antisemitism published in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The lead author of the definition has said it “was never intended to be a campus hate speech code.”

The post October 7 Survivors Sue Campus Protesters, Say Students Are “Hamas’s Propaganda Division” appeared first on The Intercept.

Some members of the Columbia University community, however, leapt at the chance to get young people they claim are “supporters of Hamas” detained and deported. Several people on a large WhatsApp group, Columbia Alumni for Israel — which counts over 1,000 members, including parents, at least one current student, and Columbia professors — welcomed Trump’s plan.

Deporting Gaza protesters was already a topic of conversation in the Columbia Alumni for Israel group before Trump’s order came down. On the president’s first day in office, group members shared flyers advertising a pro-Palestine January 21 walkout to push the school to drop disciplinary actions against anti-war protesters.

“Identifying the Columbia student-Hamas-sympathizers who show up is key to deporting those with student visas,” former Columbia’s Teachers College assistant professor Lynne Bursky-Tammam said in the chat, according to screenshots from the WhatsApp group obtained by The Intercept.

Victor Muslin, another alumnus and pro-Israel activist, responded: “If there are photos of someone who needs to be identified (even with a partially obscured face) I have access to tech that may be able to help. DM me.”

Within a few days another member posted a link to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tip line and wrote, “Let’s get to work.”

In late January, a group member shared an article about students who spray-painted a building and put cement in a sewage line to protest the anniversary of Israel’s killing of 6-year-old Hind Rajab. Bursky-Tammam responded to the article and questioned who was funding the protesters, adding, “Arresting them for hate crimes is not enough. We have to get rid of them.” (Bursky-Tammam declined to comment.)

The activities of the chat group, which formed in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack, come amid a wider campaign to crack down on dissent over Israel’s war on Gaza. Columbia has disciplined and suspended protesters — helping to create an environment that has fomented attacks using the courts, among other tactics. Members of the pro-Israel WhatsApp group, whose identities were confirmed by The Intercept using their phone numbers, were of a piece with these efforts, discussing how to report people to law enforcement, including the FBI.

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With Trump taking the Oval Office, right-wing pro-Israel activists have focused their energy on using his draconian immigration policies to deal with Israel’s critics, including efforts to paint international student protesters as terrorists to have their visas revoked.

“It’s very disturbing that the alumni and parents are doing this,” said Abed Ayoub, executive director of the civil rights group the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “Really, it’s an across-the-board attempt to silence and take away the First Amendment right of people simply because they don’t agree with them. It’s a very dangerous precedent.”

Critics of the school’s policies toward protesters say Columbia administrators have done little to intervene with attacks on students and faculty. On Thursday, two Columbia professors wrote an op-ed demanding that the school to condemn calls to deport its students.

“The Palestine exception to the First Amendment, to our right to free speech, has been something that’s been ongoing for so many years,” said Sabiya Ahamed, a staff attorney at the civil liberties group Palestine Legal, which filed a complaint about anti-Palestinian discrimination at Columbia that led to a federal investigation.

The success of offensives against pro-Palestine students and faculty on campuses across the country today stands as a testament to how far administrators have let pro-Israel advocates take their attacks, Ayoub said. And those efforts started before Trump took office.

“These universities have been laying the groundwork for whatever Trump wants to do. This targeting of the students did not begin once Trump was inaugurated. This began last year,” he said. “It began when they started targeting the students, putting them in disciplinary process, disciplinary proceedings, calling law enforcement and police to college campuses and putting the students in harm’s way.”

“We Have a List”

As campus protests grew in response to Israel’s assault on Gaza, the “Columbia Alumni for Israel” WhatsApp group kicked into overdrive. It soon became a hub for efforts to identify student and faculty protesters, claim they have links to Hamas, and discuss reporting them to the school or law enforcement agencies for alleged antisemitic activity — which, for the pro-Israel activists, includes anti-Zionist speech.

Screenshots from the group show its members frequently singling out Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim student activists, including some who have already faced disciplinary action. Faculty and other students, including Jewish student leaders, also land in the group’s crosshairs. Several messages show chat members discussing how to make reports to law enforcement, including contacting New York police and the FBI.

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Several of the students named in the WhatsApp group have also been targeted by name by groups like Canary Mission, which publishes profiles of students involved in anti-Zionist activism, or in social media posts by the group “Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia U,” which at least one chat member is involved in. One student mentioned in the chat was also named in a Twitter post from the Zionist group Betar, which last month sent a list of students it wants deported to the White House and federal agencies including ICE. (Students and faculty targeted in the screenshots from the chat declined to comment. The Intercept is withholding their names to protect them from any possible harassment.)

How Columbia has responded to the group’s activities, if at all, is unclear. Several group members have referenced meetings or correspondence with school administrators, including Columbia’s interim president, trustees, donors, and executive vice presidents.

“There are reasons why some of these efforts are not public,” wrote Heather Krasna, an associate dean of career services at Columbia, referencing meetings with top Columbia administrators. “For example, if certain efforts were publicized, specific individuals would possible [sic] be fired.” Krasna, whose handle on the WhatsApp group was simply the letter “H,” raised the possibility that their “efforts would backfire by giving pro-Hamas faculty political weapons by claiming external forces are trying to influence the university or squash free speech; a lot is happening that is confidential for these and other reasons.” (Krasna declined to respond to questions.)

Beyond pushing the school to target individual students and faculty — including calls to remove two deans — members of the WhatsApp group have also strategized how to best build cases to paint student protesters as “supporters of Hamas.”

Trump vowed to “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses” in a January 30 White House fact sheet published alongside his executive order. Like Trump, the WhatsApp group members regularly refer to opposition to the war on Gaza as sympathy or support for Hamas.

At one point, a group member pointed to an issue with only targeting foreign students: “And then there’s the problem that most of the students protesting are US citizens and cannot be deported.”

Bursky-Tammam, the former Columbia professor, also addressed how pro-Palestine U.S. citizens could be targeted. “If anyone can trace any of their funding to terror organizations, not a simple task, they can be arrested on grounds of providing ‘material support’ for terror organizations,” she wrote, referring to the Hind Rajab protest. “That is the key to getting these U.S. citizen supporters of Hamas, etc. arrested.”

Even before Trump’s executive order, Muslin, the Columbia alumnus, sent a message asking how to identify whether foreign students were on visas, and therefore eligible for removal.

“How does anyone know whether any given troublemaker is in fact a foreigner or on a visa (or not on a visa, given that Biden opened the border)?” Muslin also wrote, echoing a false right-wing claim about former President Joe Biden’s immigration policy.

Muslin, a technology executive, has been vocal in pushing colleges to treat criticism of Israel’s actions as examples of antisemitism. He founded CU-Monitor, an online platform that tracks anti-Zionism on campus. He also helps maintain the digital archive for the group Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia U, which gathers reports of alleged antisemitic incidents. When one chat participant asked whether any members had connections to Canary Misson, another user replied, “Victor is an honorary bird.” (Muslin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

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Last October, WhatsApp group administrator and Aliya Capital CEO Ari Shrage asked the group for help to “identify students who were protesting” and leaders of groups affiliated with the coalition Columbia University Apartheid Divest. Shrage, who co-founded the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association, wrote, “We have a list and need people to do some research.” Last month, he praised Trump’s executive order targeting campus protesters.

Among Jewish students targeted by the pro-Israel activists, particular ire was reserved for Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group whose Columbia chapter was already banned from campus. In one screenshot, a group member referred to members of JVP as “kapos,” a slur referencing Jewish prisoners forced to work as guards in Nazi concentration camps. At one point, following an opinion piece in the school paper by JVP members, Muslin asked for information about students involved in the group.

“Does anyone have a list of JVP members, especially group leaders or a way to get it,” Muslin wrote.

Another member responded: “My daughter will send me a list shortly,”

After the names were sent, Muslin was unsatisfied.

“Thank you. But we need more than theee [sic] random names of potentially low ranked members,” he wrote. “We need to hold leaders responsible for this antisemitic op-ed in the Spec. And we need to hold all members accountable for their membership in this despicable organization. Are club membership lists secret? How does one obtain a list of members in the official Columbia student club?”

Friends in High Places

Discussions in the group, which includes several people with teaching positions at Columbia, have also focused on efforts to communicate with school administrators and donors about the Columbia’s handling of campus speech.

In a discussion in late 2023 about how to get donors like the billionaire football team owner Robert Kraft to influence the school’s actions, Shrage wrote: “Robert is well aware of the situation.” Kraft announced last April that he would withdraw financial support from Columbia over its handling of the protests. Another group member shared a screenshot of Kraft’s contact card and said his friend knew Kraft personally and that he would reach out and report back with any information.

Gil Zussman, the chair of Columbia’s department of electrical engineering, along with Columbia Business School professors Ran Kivetz and Shai Davidai, are members of the WhatsApp group. Davidai became famous for his tirades against Gaza protests and has been accused by numerous students of online harassment. At one point, Kivetz shared a petition urging the removal of a dean over public comments at the school’s convocation last year. (Davidai, who was suspended from the Columbia campus after he posted videos of his confrontations with university staff online, declined to be interviewed without a video call. Kivetz did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)

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Zussman is a member of the school’s antisemitism task force, which was formed in November 2023 amid the protests. The task force, stacked with vocal supporters of Israel, has pushed the university to include expressions of anti-Zionism under its definition of antisemitism. Zussman regularly participates in the WhatsApp group by posting news stories, sharing his social media posts, and asking people to save protest material for an archive at the school. (Zussman did not respond to a request for comment.)

In July, Columbia alumnus Ilya Koffman told the group he had scheduled a meeting the following week with the university’s endowment arm on behalf of his private equity firm. “My initial instinct was to politely tell them we don’t want their money and explain why,” Koffman wrote, but he realized “it may be more effective to take the meeting and challenge them on what’s going on at Columbia and what, if anything, the investment arm of the endowment can and should do about it.” Koffman asked the group for any suggested questions or points. (Koffman declined to comment.)

Last April, more than 1,600 people including high-profile Columbia alumni and donors signed an open letter calling on President Minouche Shafik to clear encampments and discipline student protesters. Shafik stepped down last August amid pressure over her handling of the protests. Shrage, one of the WhatsApp group admins, wrote to the group on May 1 that he had co-authored the letter with Lisa Carnoy, a Columbia trustee emerita and current member of one of the board of visitors of the school’s Center for American Studies. (Carnoy did not respond to a request for comment.)

The alumni and donors wrote the letter “to keep pressure on the university,” Shrage said in the WhatsApp group. “Lisa hired Minouche and was former co- chair of the board,” he added, referring to Carnoy and Shafik. In another message to the group in November, Shrage wrote that Columbia alumnus David Friedman, a Trump adviser and former ambassador to Israel, was one of the first 22 people to sign the letter.

When the group member wrote in February about efforts to influence Columbia’s handling of campus speech “that are not public information” including “meetings with the Interim President,” Shrage replied and added that some of those efforts would not go public.

“A lot has already been done,” he wrote. “Multiple lawsuit, [sic] congressional hearings, meetings with influential (now former) donors, meetings and calls with people in DC, dozens and dozens of newspaper articles, an entire database of information that has been used by Congress and lawyers.”

Shrage added, “much much more that is not public information that likely will never become public info. We are all frustrated but much has been done and working together makes us all stronger.” Shrage declined to speak to The Intercept on the record.

Normalizing the Crackdown

In the past, Columbia opposed moves by the federal government that impacted foreign students. The school took part in litigation against ICE restrictions affecting international students in 2020 and issued a statement denouncing Trump’s order barring immigrants from several Muslim countries in 2017.

Lee Bollinger, the president of the university at the time, wrote that while it was important for the school to avoid political or ideological stances, it had a responsibility to step forward “when policies and state action conflict with its fundamental values, and especially when they bespeak purposes and a mentality that are at odds with our basic mission.”

For the WhatsApp group members who seek deportations and terrorism charges, the school’s actions against pro-Palestine students are regularly described as grossly insufficient. Palestine Legal’s Ahamed said, however, that the actions of groups like Columbia Alumni for Israel are aided by the school’s own crackdown on pro-Palestine protests.

“All of these things that the university has been doing has been normalizing the fact that it is wrong to say something about Palestine, it is against our policies to protest for Palestine,” she said. “That is the kind of message that the university has been sending. So it’s not that surprising then that you see these sorts of WhatsApp groups. And people feel comfortable being a part of a group like that.”

The post The Columbia Network Pushing Behind the Scenes to Deport and Arrest Student Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.

So when a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology withdrew from a grant from the Israeli military after hearing feedback from students protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza, it was especially welcome news.

“This is one of the only cases where we know that student activism and public pressure led directly to an Israeli tie being cut, let alone a collaboration with its genocidal military,” said Mila Halgren, a postdoctoral associate at MIT. (The university did not respond to a request for comment.)

MIT has come under internal and public scrutiny for conducting research on warfare technology sponsored by Israel. In July, the United Nations condemned the school for conducting “weapons and surveillance research funded by the Israeli ministry of defense — the only foreign military financing research at the institute.”

That research included projects on drone swarm control — technology which the Israeli military has used during its siege on Gaza — pursuit algorithms, and underwater surveillance.

Markus Buehler, a professor in the civil engineering department, withdrew the grant earlier this summer shortly after a student pro-Palestine group publicized it on Instagram.

“This concession shows that student campaigns do have an influence,” Halgren said. “It also shows that these ties cannot survive transparency and public awareness. Student action is not meaningless; despite increased repression, it is more important than ever to resist genocide.”

Obscuring the Money Trail

MIT has said its proposals are not confidential and that it does not allow funders to make them secret. As students have drawn public attention to the school’s history of developing war technology for Israel, however, the school has made that information opaque, Halgren said.

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MIT Shuts Down Internal Grant Database After It Was Used to Research School’s Israel Ties

Students used the school’s internal grant database to identify new contracts with the Israeli Ministry of Defense earlier this year and published a report on more than $3.7 million the Israeli military spent on warfare and surveillance research. (The U.N. mentioned several of those projects in its report this summer criticizing MIT for conducting Israeli military research during the ongoing genocide.)

After the student report was published, the school added new restrictions on access to the data, The Intercept previously reported.

In July, students found a loophole and identified more contracts sponsored by the Israeli military, including Buehler’s. The school responded by adding further restrictions to the database and a warning that unauthorized access could result in disciplinary action. Last month, school police issued a criminal trespass order to a lecturer and former student, citing unauthorized data access in July and August.

The school also stopped publicizing its research sponsors earlier this year. MIT took down its “Brown Book,” which documented its sponsored research, and said it would not publish them going forward. At the time, an MIT spokesperson said the school removed the reports to bring its financial reporting practices in line with federal requirements and “typical” disclosures, MIT’s student newspaper The Tech reported.

“Due to making these Israeli military ties public, MIT has removed access to both of its grant databases,” Halgren said. “There are now no sources for MIT community members to see who funds our school’s research.”

MIT students protesting genocide in Gaza have been calling on the school to drop research funded by the Israeli military since campus protests last spring.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth said in a July statement that school researchers working on projects funded by the Israeli military had faced “willful mischaracterizations” of their work. In a statement defending a professor named in the report as conducting Israeli-funded defense and surveillance research, Kornbluth wrote that suggestions that their research was designed for conflict were “untrue.”

While MIT has cut ties with other countries where partnerships raised concerns about human rights, the school has said it has “compelling reasons” not to cut ties with the Israeli military.

“One contract is down, but we won’t stop until MIT announces a full research stoppage for the Israeli military,” Halgren said. “As a military science school, MIT students and staff have a unique responsibility to stand up to the U.S.–Israeli war machine and prevent more horrifying violence in Palestine.”

The post MIT Professor Cancels Israeli Military Grant After Student Pressure appeared first on The Intercept.

University and Fairfax County police refused to show the family the warrant. One Fairfax County detective with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force — cross-designated as a local and federal agent — was also present. The family and Mason faculty supporting them, however, believe they know what the FBI-led investigation was about: the young family members’ pro-Palestine activism.

Two of the Palestinian American family’s daughters attend George Mason. One is an undergraduate student and the co-president of Mason’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. The other is in a master’s program at Mason and a former president of the school’s SJP chapter. 

“These students haven’t been accused of a criminal, civil, or student conduct violation, yet they have been banned from campus.”

The authorities told the family the raid was related to a spray-paint vandalism incident at George Mason’s campus in August — part of the widespread campus protests related to Israel’s war on Gaza. In September, the university police department put out flyers offering a $2,000 reward for information about the incident. 

In short order, the school’s SJP chapter was suspended. Soon after, George Mason Police Chief Carl Rowan Jr. served the sisters with criminal trespass notices barring them from campus for four years — meaning that they can no longer continue their education.  

“I’m worried for our students and I’m concerned for our schools,” said Mason professor Ben Manski, the SJP chapter’s faculty adviser. “There are still no allegations and no charges that I’m aware of. Without those, we can’t have due process, we don’t know what is behind these actions, and we can’t know whether the public interest is being served or harmed.”

Alexander Monea, an associate professor of English at George Mason, questioned the school’s disciplinary process.

“These students haven’t been accused of a criminal, civil, or student conduct violation,” Monea said, “yet they have been banned from campus for four years, effectively expelling them from the university.”

In a letter Tuesday night on the George Mason raid, more than 80 groups, including chapters of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine at Mason and 11 other schools, called on Mason to revoke the trespass orders, reinstate the SJP chapter, return laptops and phones to the two students, and conduct a full independent investigation into the decisions made by Mason police, school administrators, and the Board of Visitors — the university’s governing body — that led to the raid.

“Do universities such as GMU routinely send phalanxes of police officers in military fatigues and armored vehicles, and carrying assault rifles, to break down the front door and raid the homes of students during the pre-dawn hours over an allegation of spray painting? Do administrators routinely rush to judgment and issue criminal trespass orders—the kind used to exclude serial sexual predators and stalkers from campus—against students who have been accused of graffiti?” the groups wrote. “It appears that the answers to these questions may increasingly be ‘yes.’”

“An Extension of State Power”

The severe moves against the family and the school’s SJP chapter are part of the latest wave of the crackdown against campus Palestine solidarity protests. As Israel’s war and demonstrations against it have dragged into a second year, the repression of Gaza protests continues to derail students’ education and ensnare them in disciplinary and court proceedings over activism on campus. 

Police in Philadelphia conducted a similar raid in October, The Intercept reported, when authorities descended on the home of student leaders in the University of Pennsylvania’s Palestine solidarity movement.

An attorney for the family questioned the basis for the raid and called on George Mason to resist overreach by law enforcement. “It’s clear that the university and police—local and federal—are working in tandem to intimidate, penalize, and criminalize student activism around Palestine,” said attorney Abdel-Rahman Hamed.

“Students, faculty, and people of conscience must stand firmly against this authoritarian overreach and demand accountability from university administrators, the police, and the Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney.”

George Mason spokesperson Paola Duran declined to answer questions about the raid. “The university has no comment on matters of ongoing criminal investigations,” Duran said in a statement to The Intercept. 

Fairfax County Police Department’s public affairs office told The Intercept the department only assisted with the case and that George Mason University and the FBI were the lead investigators and directed questions to them. FBI Washington field office spokesperson Lira Gallagher said the agency could not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation and directed questions to George Mason police. The Fairfax County Attorney and George Mason police did not respond to requests for comment. 

Police used excessive violence in the raid in response to paint on the floor, said Bassam Haddad, a member of the George Mason faculty. 

“Universities and university administrators have become an extension of state power, and we have now seen it firsthand in this case of a violent raid into the students’ home without any material evidence whatsoever,” said Haddad, a founding director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies program at George Mason and an associate professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government.

It was not lost on George Mason students that the crackdown seemed to target the large number of Arab and Muslim students at the school. 

“When they do things like this, it really does impact an entire community and an entire demographic at our school.”

“This repression has really been built up against multiple organizations on campus, especially with SJP, but really with any pro-Palestinian leaning organizations,” said a student representative of the George Mason University Coalition for Palestine, a campus organization, who asked for anonymity to avoid retaliation. “GMU has a huge Arab and Muslim population. When they do things like this, it really does impact an entire community and an entire demographic at our school.” 

“This honestly has just been an attack, not only on Palestinian organizers and the movement in general, but also on free speech as well.”

SJP Suspension

When police arrived at the household last month, they forced the family to gather in the living room while they searched the house, according to two people familiar with the matter. Some family members were eventually released to attend work, but the rest remained while police conducted their six-hour search.

Police seized electronics from the residence, including phones and laptops, but made no arrests. At one point, police found antique firearms legally registered to the family’s son, a Mason alum and volunteer deputy chief firefighter. 

Following the raid, authorities brought charges against the son related to the firearms. He litigated the charges, and a Fairfax County Circuit Court judge dismissed them two weeks later. 

“As a faculty senator, my colleagues asked me to raise a question to President Gregory Washington about the students’ family home being raided during a faculty senate meeting,” said Monea, the English professor. “He declined to share any information with the faculty senate at that time.”

Mason administrators sent an email to the SJP co-president the day after the raid announcing that the SJP chapter had been placed under an interim suspension. Since the daughter who currently leads SJP had her computer seized, however, she did not see the email until the following week. 

No other SJP members nor Manski, the group’s faculty adviser, were made aware of the suspension until later last month. They finally found out when SJP members were told that a scheduled panel with the school chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had been canceled due to the suspension. 

The raid is part of the school’s increasing hostility toward activism against the war in Gaza, said Haddad, the faculty member supporting students. George Mason’s Board of Visitors — the school’s governing body — includes two appointments by Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin who currently work at the Heritage Foundation, which has called on the FBI to investigate campus protests against the war on Gaza. 

“Have we become like the Soviet Union that we have been supposedly criticizing for decades, and now we continue to use as an example of overstretched power, corrupt power, and repressive and tyrannical power?” Haddad said. “Is this what we have become?”

Update: December 4, 2024
This story has been updated to include a letter from more than 80 groups criticizing the police raid of the George Mason students’ home and calling for many of the official actions against them to be reversed.

The post Police Raid Pro-Palestine Students’ Home in FBI-Led Graffiti Investigation appeared first on The Intercept.

Mahdawi’s green card was revoked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio under an obscure provision of immigration law that allows the deportation of people deemed to be a threat to U.S. foreign policy. In Mahdawi’s case, according to the New York Times, Rubio said, without any evidence, that the student’s activism stoked antisemitism that undermined the peace process to end Israel’s war in Gaza.

Mahdawi was vocally opposed to both terrorism and antisemitism, said his Israeli associate, a former Columbia student named Mikey Baratz.

“The irony of him, of all people, being someone they target is so funny to me — this person who has denounced violence,” Baratz said. “This is a person who had a split from the protest movement because he felt like they were not self-policing. This is a person who has had many, many disagreements with the pro-Palestine movement for feeling that they are refusing to moderate.”

“The irony of him, of all people, being someone they target is so funny to me — this person who has denounced violence.”

Mahdawi was a leader of Columbia’s student protest movement against the war on Gaza. 

Battling often baseless allegations that pro-Palestine campus movements were suffused with support for terror and antisemitism, Mahdawi seemed to be the epitome of what the movement’s biggest critics said they wanted to see. He became an outspoken supporter of peaceful opposition to the war and, speaking in December 2023 on “60 Minutes,” the most watched news broadcast in the country, denounced antisemitism.

“Since the war has broken out, many of us Israelis have tried to say, ‘Well, where are the Palestinians who will take a stand? Where are the Palestinians who want peace? Where are the Palestinians who want coexistence?” Baratz said. “It’s like: ’Here it is! Here, this is what we’ve been asking for!’”

“Every Reason to Hate Me”

Mahdawi had stepped back from the movement in the spring of 2024 to focus on building bridges with Israeli and Jewish students on campus. Shortly after stepping back from the movement, he began reaching out to colleagues in the protest movement to ask if they knew any Israelis on campus interested in discussing ways to build community and peace with Palestinians. 

In October 2024, Mahdawi was connected with Baratz, then a student at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. The two met for coffee. 

“He has every reason to be angry and want violence. And he doesn’t.”

“You’re nervous, you’re really nervous,” Baratz said of their initial meeting. “I’d had conversations with people in the pro-Palestine movement and they were often constructive but always difficult.” 

Once they started chatting, however, the mood quickly lifted: “Within 15 minutes, we were joking.”

Baratz worked for the last six months with Mahdawi, who was arrested Monday after he arrived for what he thought was his citizenship interview at a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Vermont. Instead of leaving on the path to citizenship as he’d hoped, Mahdawi was detained by ICE and ordered to be deported to the West Bank. 

Born in a refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Mahdawi has over the years lost at least eight members of his family and had others tortured, imprisoned, and attacked by Israeli forces.

“He has every reason to hate me,” Baratz said. “He has every reason to be angry and want violence. And he doesn’t.”

Baratz said his conversations with Mahdawi were not always easy, but they were essential.

“Mohsen and I do not agree on everything, and some of his views have been challenging for me to hear, but the converse of that is that many of my views have been equally challenging for Mohsen to hear,” Baratz said. “As soon as we label all views that we do not like as outside the bounds of what’s acceptable, then we lose the ability to find a middle ground.”

Against Antisemitism

The Trump administration has targeted and deported pro-Palestine students in the name of fighting antisemitism. In the lead-up to his arrest, Mahdawi became the target of factions on Columbia’s campus and several Zionist groups that have named students publicly or said they’ve sent lists of students to federal agencies for deportation. 

“These groups are, one, doing so much more harm than good, and, two — I mean, talk about selective, right?,” Baratz said. “How can I take anyone seriously talking about Mohsen being antisemitic? They don’t know Mohsen. They don’t talk to him.”

In his 2023 “60 Minutes” interview, Mahdawi was asked about someone making an antisemitic remark at a pro-Palestine protest on Columbia’s campus. Mahdawi said he confronted the offender and used a bullhorn to publicly denounce the remark.

“To be antisemitic is unjust,” Mahdawi told “60 Minutes.” “And the fight for the freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand in hand, because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

A lawsuit filed against the government shortly after his detention referenced that Mahdawi’s detention relies on the same obscure provision of immigration law that was used as the basis for ICE’s abduction last month of recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil. The government has used the provision to claim that Khalil and Mahdawi’s speech on Palestine have adverse policy consequences for the U.S. The Trump administration has routinely accused pro-Palestine protesters of supporting terror and conflated their actions with support for Hamas.

Responses to pro-Palestine campus protests have ranged from the absurd to hypocritical to explicitly violent — from claims that a student assaulted administrators by using a bullhorn indoors, to contractors painting over protesters, to counter-protesters attacking students with what students said was a chemical spray. 

The notion that targeting people like Mahdawi is working to fight terror not only lays bare the baselessness of claims about the protesters, but also exposes a double standard being applied, Baratz said. 

“Israel’s Minister of National Security has been convicted in Israel for supporting a terrorist organization,” he said. “The charges that are being leveled against Mohsen, the Israeli Minister of National Security has been convicted of in Israel. So when do Jews who support him start being evicted from the States?”

Baratz said Mahdawi reminded him that the only way forward was to keep humanity’s shared values in mind. 

“If there’s anything we as Jews should know, it’s that this is familiar to us. We see ourselves in the other, we see ourselves in the stranger,” Baratz said. “Our history is rife with expulsion and prejudice. And I hope that maybe this can be an opportunity to remind us that it doesn’t have to be this way.”

The post “How Can I Take Anyone Seriously Talking About Mohsen Being Antisemitic?” appeared first on The Intercept.

No Labels promoted the Wednesday event as a “special Zoom call” with “the leading voices in their parties” opposing student protests against the war in Gaza, which spread to more than 150 campuses in the last two weeks.

The bipartisan pair praised the responses of universities that have called on police to violently quell protests and promised that Congress would be doing more to investigate the student movements, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Intercept. The lawmakers and university board of trustee members repeatedly claimed that nefarious outside actors are funding and organizing the encampments on university campuses. 

Gottheimer said that he had been in touch with officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation about campus protests. “Based on my conversations with the FBI — there’s activity I can’t get into, you know, given my committee responsibilities, I can’t get into more specifics — but I can just say that I think people are well aware this is an issue,“ said Gottheimer, who is on the House Intelligence Committee. 

“I can’t speak for the local FBI field offices, but it’s got to be all hands on deck,” he added. “I believe following the money is the key. Gotta follow the money. A lot of these universities are not transparent at all, remotely, about where the money comes from, you know, they just, they want it — and that has to be a big part of this.” 

This week, House Republicans said they would investigate federal funding for universities that held campus protests. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., announced the plans on Tuesday alongside the chairs of six congressional committees. 

Gottheimer and Lawler have been at the forefront of congressional efforts to defend Israel amid its brutal war on Gaza. They led bipartisan efforts to silence criticism of Israel and to protect Israel from being held accountable for using the billions of dollars it receives from the United States in violation of international law. 

Gottheimer, Lawler, and No Labels did not respond to requests for comment.

Among the most prominent themes of the discussion were getting the FBI more involved in investigating American college campuses, and fears of outside agitators stoking the anti-war protests. New York University Chair Emeritus and Executive Vice Chair Bill Berkley, whose campus this week welcomed police to arrest over a dozen students, claimed that a New York City-based Palestine solidarity group had been very involved in leading protest efforts in the city and suggested that the feds should investigate.

Berkley claimed that “we have deciphered messages” that showed the group directing people to the encampment at Columbia. He also suggested that, because many of the tents at campus protests were the same, the demonstrations had been orchestrated externally. (Many prominent critics of the protest, including New York City Mayor Eric Adams, have repeated that claim. As the New York City outlet Hell Gate and others have pointed out, the tents are sold for $15 at Five Below and around $30 at Amazon and Walmart. “My God…looks like what we’ve got on our hands is a classic case of college students buying something cheap and disposable,” wrote Hell Gate.)

Berkley then asked why the FBI hadn’t yet taken action against the demonstrations. “And, by the way, the FBI and the terrorist monitoring groups know this — why haven’t we seen any action by the federal government?” He did not respond to requests for comment.

Lawler, who co-sponsored a recent bill to ban TikTok, repeated Berkley’s claims about external organizers and said that was the type of thing that inspired Congress’s efforts to ban the app. “I don’t think there’s any question that there has been a coordinated effort off these college campuses, and that you have outside paid agitators and activists,” Lawler said. “It also highlights exactly why we included the TikTok bill in the foreign supplemental aid package because you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the U.S.” 

Lawler added that he would look into domestic groups funding protests. Gottheimer, for his part, said demonstrations at Columbia were “potentially” led by outsiders and repeated his frequent claim that the protesters support Hamas. 

Andrew Bursky, the board chair of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, said America’s tradition of campus protests was “a positive thing,” but that there’s a “clear dark line” between allowing free speech and condoning antisemitism. “And I think you guys in Congress have darkened that line today with this piece of legislation,” he added. Bursky did not specify what legislation he was referring to, but earlier that day, the House of Representatives passed a Republican-led bill that expanded the definition of antisemitism. 

Students had forfeited their right to protest, Bursky went on, due to “physical violence, or threats of physical violence or harassment,” among other things. He said that universities that have failed to make that line clear and as a result “have chaos and anarchy,” stating that “the only way to fix it is to bring in law enforcement.”

“The only way to fix it is to bring in law enforcement.”

Bursky did not mention the most prominent examples of physical violence on his own campus or elsewhere. When police came onto Washington University in St. Louis this week, officers beat a professor from another university, slammed him, and dragged his limp body — leaving him with several broken ribs and a broken hand. At the University of California, Los Angeles, meanwhile, a pro-Israel mob shot fireworks, sprayed mace, and hurled fists and slurs at pro-Palestine students and student journalists. 

In a statement to The Intercept, Bursky said that “any injury of any individual, protestor or a member of law enforcement, is very unfortunate and regrettable.” He also reiterated students’ right to peacefully protest, noting that those rights are constrained by “well-documented” time and place restrictions meant to ensure that university business can go on as usual. “So long as those restrictions … are respected, the freedom of members of the university community to engage in protest must and will be protected,” he wrote. “Also, to be clear, protests that decay into violence or speech that is hate speech threatening to individuals or specific groups will never be acceptable.”

On the call, Gottheimer applauded Bursky and other university leaders for bringing police to campus. “Listen, it took a while for the board of trustees of Columbia to get to the right place. They eventually got to the right place,” he said. (The night before the call, Columbia had welcomed militarized police to invade one of its campus buildings to arrest students en masse — leaving some bruised and injured. One police officer even accidentally fired a gun on campus.)

A speaker who was identified on the call as Howard Berk and said he is involved in Texas urged the members of Congress to back schools doing “a great job.” While those leaders “may have support from the top,” Berk said, “they’re getting tremendous heat, obviously, from a minority of students, and from the faculty.” The University of Texas at Austin was widely scrutinized after hordes of riot police met peaceful protesters with tear gas and flash grenades. (There is a Howard Berk on the board of the University of Texas/Texas A&M Investment Management Company; he did not respond to requests for comment.)

Berk also complained that universities were not getting support from federal agencies to investigate protests. “The FBI question is an interesting one,” Berk said. He added that he’d heard from people in Texas that the “FBI have not really been helpful.” Universities were doing their own investigations “with really no help from the feds as my understanding at this point,” he said. “So it’s important.”

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NYC Mayor Smeared a Grandmother as an “Outside Agitator” to Justify NYPD Assault on Columbia

Lawler applauded the response from the New York Police Department, whose counterterror unit he said was doing a good job of “finding some leads,” but said that the FBI could aid its response. “I definitely think the FBI could certainly be a little more helpful here. But again, I think Congress is going to take action,” he said.

Gottheimer agreed with Berk’s call to praise “all the right universities,” including schools in Texas and Florida “that have stepped up.” Among elite schools, he praised Princeton and Dartmouth, where the former chair of Jewish Studies was pushed down, arrested, and banned from campus for photographing protests. (The college later revoked the ban.)

Lawler and Gottheimer both visited Columbia’s campus in recent weeks to express concern for Jewish students. Neither appeared to spend time with Jewish students participating in the anti-war protests, let alone the Palestinian students who may be mourning family members killed by American bombs.

Last week, Lawler co-sponsored the “COLUMBIA Act” alongside Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., which would impose an antisemitism monitor on any college or university receiving federal funding. 

Gottheimer, meanwhile, has been among the most outspoken members of his party. He has called Democrats who don’t support Israel a “cancer” and joined efforts to pressure university presidents at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania to resign. In the days after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, Gottheimer reportedly suggested Muslim clerics are “guilty” of the attack. Gottheimer denied that he had made the comment and said his remarks were taken out of context.

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Rep. Josh Gottheimer Goes to War Against High Schoolers Protesting for Gaza

In November, he voted with Republicans to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian member of Congress. In January, Gottheimer was one of 62 Democrats to join 148 Republicans in expressing “disgust” at South Africa’s suit accusing Israel of genocide, an accusation that the International Court of Justice later found to be plausible. The New Jersey Democrat also co-led a resolution to condemn the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which the House passed in April.

One day after the call, No Labels, which spent much of the last year recruiting a spoiler candidate for the 2024 presidential election, sent out a fundraising email asking donors to max out contributions to both members of Congress. “As college campuses are gripped by anti-Israel, antisemitic protests, Reps. Josh Gottheimer and Mike Lawler are showing what bipartisan leadership looks like. They are standing up against these extremist bullies — on campuses and in Congress — and deserve our support. Would you show your support by making a donation of the maximum of $6,600 to Reps. Gottheimer and Lawler today?”

The post In No Labels Call, Josh Gottheimer, Mike Lawler, and University Trustees Agree: FBI Should Investigate Campus Protests appeared first on The Intercept.

The raids were the latest move by the University of Michigan and the state against student organizers following the protest encampments last spring. The school has seen particularly harsh repression of campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. 

While no arrests were made, all electronics were seized into FBI custody and at least two DNA samples were collected, according to local attorneys representing the subjects of the raids. The warrants were from Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office and signed by a judge in the 45th District Court in the small town of Oak Park, Michigan, but attorneys also say they have yet to see probable cause for the search and seizures. Nessel, a Democrat, still has not unsealed and shared the affidavits for the warrants with lawyers or the residents they raided.

“These raids were very much seen as an escalation by the state attorney general.”

“These raids were very much seen as an escalation by the state attorney general, who’s expressed quite a bit of an extreme reaction against the students’ activism on the University of Michigan campus,” said John Philo, executive and legal director of the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice, the group representing the targets of the raids. “In terms of probable cause for the warrants, it’s entirely unknown at the moment. The search warrants were issued based on a complaint and the judge has ordered for the affidavit to be suppressed. It’s a terribly unusual thing.”

Nessel, who asked the FBI to carry out the raids, has positioned herself publicly as one of President Donald Trump’s biggest opponents. She also has extensive personal, political, and financial ties to the University of Michigan, which bypassed local prosecutors by enlisting Nessel to crack down on pro-Palestine protesters.

According to Philo and Liz Jacob, also of the Sugar Law Center, the FBI presented warrants in Ann Arbor and Canton before entering the premises, but refused to show any at the Ypsilanti residence. 

“Folks were shocked, especially to see that the FBI was executing an attorney general warrant,” Jacob told The Intercept in an interview. “I’ve never seen that in my experience, and we have not seen that in Michigan around pro-Palestine protests or on any other protests, to my knowledge.”

Related

Police Raid Pro-Palestine Students’ Home in FBI-Led Graffiti Investigation

Following the raids, officials denied any connection to the students’ political protest, claiming the FBI was becoming involved in a “vandalism investigation.” In its official press release following the raids, Nessel’s office claimed the 12 “coordinated” vandalism incidents that occurred across the state — including graffiti that read “Free Palestine” — totaled to damages of $100,000.

Student organizers have cast doubt on Nessel’s denial that the raids were not related to their pro-Palestine protest.

“This is about the occupation and the genocide of Palestinians, and the fact that the state does not care about Americans in any way,” said Ira, a Muslim organizer with TAHRIR, a coalition that advocates against the University of Michigan’s complicity in the genocide against Palestinians, who asked to use only their first name for fear of retaliation from the school. “It’s not just about us being targeted right now. All of these people — not just the Trump administration, but these Democrats — who are claiming to fight for Americans are the ones who are attacking and repressing us.”

“Shotgun Approach”

Last October, Nessel filed felony criminal trespass charges against seven student protesters who were arrested last May at a University of Michigan encampment. Those charges were dropped in May, just before a judge was to decide whether or not to disqualify Nessel over alleged bias. Nessel cited “legal delays and controversies surrounding the case” as to why she dropped the charges. 

Local organizers, however, fear that the FBI raids are only a stepping stone to something bigger — and that the dropping of the charges is only a temporary relief.

Affidavits are typically sealed in cases when there is a confidential informant working with law enforcement who could be compromised. Philo said this would be difficult to understand in this case, especially considering that none of the students raided have any prior criminal activity or pending criminal charges or accusations against them. For what has been alleged, the warrants appeared to be an extreme measure for a vandalism investigation, according to both Sugar Law Center and student organizers who spoke with The Intercept.

“The scope and scale of what is alleged does not seem to warrant three law enforcement agencies descending on the homes of students, who by all calculations and known facts, have been accused of a crime in the past,” said Philo, who describes his clients as “pretty diligent and responsible students.” 

The attorney general’s raid executed a “shotgun approach” to further chill protest in solidarity with Palestine, he said. 

“To do this in that context with the FBI, state troopers, and local law enforcement,” he said, “sends a clear message that this is well beyond trying to determine who committed spray painting incidents.”

While it may be considered unusual for the FBI to become involved in a vandalism investigation, it is not uncommon for the FBI to join forces with local and state law enforcement agencies to work in a joint terrorism task force context, said Mike German, who worked as a special agent in the FBI for six years and is now a fellow at the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program.

“In that context, it’s not uncommon for a situation — where a person is alleged to have violated some state law — for them to use the state authorities to pursue that angle of investigation while also gathering evidence for a future terrorism investigation,” he explains. 

While German does not have any specific information about the Michigan cases, he says this does follow a pattern aligned with the government’s increased surveillance of citizens coupled with the FBI’s lax approach to far-right violence. He added that the raids in Michigan appear to be part of a broader escalation and expansion of power of the FBI since the September 11 attacks, particularly with the passing of more and more domestic terrorism statutes at federal and state levels. Just having increased powers, German said, created a motivation for using them.

“It has created an insatiable appetite for information,” he said. “Anywhere that they can get data and information to put into their databases, they’ll take those opportunities.”

Correction: June 25, 2025
This story has been updated to correct an errant reference to Oak Point, Michigan. The town is Oak Park.

The post Democrat Michigan AG Asked FBI to Raid Protesters’ Homes — But Won’t Tell Students Why appeared first on The Intercept.

Continued campus protests against the Gaza war have sparked heated debates around free speech, academic freedom, and the role of universities in addressing global issues. 

This spring saw an outpouring of students demanding that their institutions divest from Israel. Since then, universities have taken sometimes draconian measures to stop protests before they even begin.

On this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing, Intercept reporters Akela Lacy and Jonah Valdez, who have been following the protest movements for months, discuss the latest developments and how college administrators are responding. 

Lacy followed one such case at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where students were hit with severe charges for vandalism. “The school is trying to make an example of student leaders in the movement for Palestine to chill further speech,” Lacy says. “I want to emphasize the fact that these are felony charges for undergraduate students for a nonviolent offense that is putting paint on a building.”

Students and organizers who spoke with Valdez anticipate even greater hostility for protesters of every kind once Donald Trump takes office again in January. “This is what a lot of organizers were telling me leading up to Election Day was that there’s going to be so many other attacks on the rights of many other people,” he says, “whether it’s reproductive rights, rights of trans people, LGBTQ community at large, rights of immigrants, all on top of the ongoing genocide and occupation of Palestine.”

To hear more about the chilling effects on free speech and protest, listen to this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing.

The post The “Palestine Exception” appeared first on The Intercept.

On Friday night, early votes had already been cast in their many thousands for Mayor-elect of New York City Zohran Mamdani. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, who leads the prominent Central Synagogue in Manhattan, took the occasion to slander the democratic socialist candidate, purportedly in the name of Jewish New Yorkers.

“Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism,” Buchdahl said.

Mamdani’s alleged antisemitism? Pointing out, in 2023, the established fact that the Israeli military has trained hundreds of members of the New York Police Department, and that the NYPD and Israeli forces have intelligence sharing agreements. The rabbi also decried Mamdani’s “false claims of genocide” in Gaza — claims shared by leading genocide scholars, and every major international human rights organization.

That is, Buchdahl didn’t — and couldn’t — cite any actual antisemitism on the newly elected mayor’s part. Her problem, as was the case for the array of establishment Jewish voices who spoke out against Mamdani, was his criticism of Israel.

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Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City is a victory — or at least offers promise — for so many of the city’s working-class constituents. For our immigrant neighbors, trans siblings, and every New Yorker struggling to pay rent, eat, and access care in this punishingly expensive, brutally unequal place.

It is a particular bright relief that base Islamophobia — entrenched since the September 11 attacks, supercharged during the Gaza genocide, and drenching every campaign against Mamdani — did not prevail.

Antisemitism Smears

Mamdani’s win marks a rejection of the consistently Islamophobic weaponization of antisemitism. I hope it is a turning point, from which other New York institutions learn. Diehard support for the Zionist project is, finally, not a sine qua non of New York City leadership.

If Mamdani’s victory was a victory over Islamophobia and false antisemitism allegations, it was not quite a total one. The significant support for the attacks against the mayor-elect, and the purchase they found with converts to disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, was jarring.

It was depressing for this Jewish writer to see significant numbers of particularly older Jewish voters back the slanders against Mamdani. The explanation, however, is simple enough: The very same Jewish figures and groups have been organizing their political lives around support for a genocidal ethnostate.

With the genocide in Gaza raging, weaponized claims of antisemitism, launched by pro-Israel forces have won the day in this city for over two years. Students, workers, and other protesters stood up to decry their institutions’ complicity in Israel’s onslaught.

At every turn, Democratic leaders bolstered and enforced calls for expressions of Palestinian solidarity to be censured and punished. Mayor Eric Adams sent police to raid Columbia University campus protests at the direct behest of pro-Israel business leaders. Baseless accusations of antisemitism went wholly unchecked.

It was a lesson in cowardice and complicity, which has only served President Donald Trump’s attacks on higher education and anti-Arab, anti-Muslim immigration crackdowns.

Setting an Example

The fact that the majority of young Jewish New Yorkers expressed support for Mamdani, as did some of the most powerful Jewish politicians in the city and the country, should have long ago served to mute the attacks against him. Yet there will be no reasoning with a worldview that treats support for Palestinian freedom, and criticism of Israel, as a threat to Jewish life.

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Mamdani, however, did not have to sacrifice Palestinian solidarity to win this election. He did not have to pander to the endless false claims of antisemitism directed at him at every debate and most every mainstream press interview.

Mamdani did not have to sacrifice Palestinian solidarity to win this election.

And, when he is the mayor, there is every reason to demand that he uphold commitments to Palestinian solidarity, including ending municipal partnerships with the state of Israel as it continues its campaign of mass slaughter, displacement, occupation, and apartheid.

I have no doubt that Mamdani will live up to his vows to support and protect New York’s Jewish communities; there were never any justified grounds to believe otherwise. His mayorship, among so many other things, should set an example of how supporting Jewish New Yorkers can be paired with a refusal to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

“No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election,” said Mamdani Tuesday night, addressing his supporters in Brooklyn, after being declared the next mayor of New York City.

The post They Tried to Smear Zohran Mamdani as an Antisemite. Voters Saw Right Through It. appeared first on The Intercept.

Citing an anti-immigration order that included language targeting those who “provide aid, advocacy, or support for foreign terrorists,” Elizabeth Rand posted a call to action on January 21.

“We now have a signed executive order authorizing the deportation of foreign students who support Hamas,” Rand wrote in a post to a Facebook group called Mothers Against College Antisemitism, which she founded soon after the October 7 attacks. She shared a link to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tip line and urged members to use it to file complaints against university students and faculty. “Please tell everyone you know who is at a university to file complaints about foreign students and faculty who support Hamas.” 

It’s the latest effort by Rand and the group to push for crackdowns against college students — a campaign that, by her account, has been hugely influential, especially at NYU.

Rand launched the Facebook group, also known as MACA, after coming across news of campus protests at the colleges where her son was applying, she told the Times of Israel. Originally intended to be a place where college parents could “do something as a group other than just complaining about it on Facebook,” the group has grown to more than 62,000 members who regularly discuss campus protests and how to file complaints against individual students or faculty at universities.

Screenshots shared with The Intercept show Rand boasting of her group’s sway on NYU and its president, Linda Mills. Rand and MACA members have taken credit for convincing the school to crack down more aggressively on students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza and getting an NYU graduate student teacher suspended. Rand has also posted about convincing the school to drop a student conduct meeting involving her son. She has shared images of emails of her direct correspondence with Mills, who apologized for the inquiry into her son’s conduct and praised him for getting straight As.

Rand did not respond to a request for comment. It’s unknown if anyone has actually reported NYU students or faculty to ICE per Rand’s suggestions. Rand removed some of the posts after The Intercept reached out for comment. 

NYU said federal law prohibits discussing individual student records. The school did not respond to questions about the notion that Rand has any undue influence on its decision-making.

But some faculty are alarmed by what they see as special treatment going to a parent with access to the school’s top leaders.

In response to The Intercept’s reporting, the NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors called for an immediate independent review of communications between Mills and Rand for possible violations of university policy and federal law under Title VI, which bars organizations that receive federal funding from discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin. 

“In addition to being hypocritical and grotesque, it appears to be evidence of actual discrimination at the administrative level at NYU,” said Zachary Samalin, an associate professor of English at NYU. “It shows that there is a different standard applied in the way that students are being punished.”

Earlier this month, NYU suspended 13 students who participated in a December protest at the campus library, where demonstrators staged a sit-in and called on the school to cut its financial ties to Israel. Students were notified of the suspensions on January 7 and given five days to appeal. 

In a post to the group last week, Rand played up her role in the suspensions. “I’ll take some credit for this one,” she wrote, and shared an article about the suspensions published on January 23.

Rand, an attorney in New York City, had been in contact with NYU President Linda Mills about the library protest, the screenshots show. In an email to Mills, the text of which Rand shared to her Facebook group, Rand said protesters had violated the school’s code of conduct by blocking building access and were intimidating students. “I just sent you $13,000 the other day. As a parent and a consumer I’m outraged,” she wrote to Mills.

Members of Rand’s group had attended counter-protests near the school’s campus and would return if the school did not intervene, she warned. “If this isn’t stopped, I’ll be happy to send them back,” Rand wrote. 

A staffer in Mills’s office assured Rand that NYU was handling the protests. “I am writing to let you know that we have cleared the disruption and that arrests were made,” wrote Ariel Ennis, a staffer who works under the president. “Best of luck to your son during his final exams and never hesitate to reach out in the future.”

NYU spokesperson John Beckman said the school could not comment on individual student disciplinary records but handles disciplinary proceedings based upon fact-finding efforts. Beckman did not respond to questions about whether Rand has influenced decision-making by NYU leaders.

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Members of the MACA group also took credit after NYU claimed they would suspend a graduate student teacher who they claimed canceled a class during library protests last month and encouraged students to participate. In a post to the Facebook group on January 7, Rand notified members that she had a call with NYU about the teacher. The group had previously sent an email to NYU professors complaining about the teacher canceling class during the protest, which was what “sparked the call,” Rand wrote.

Rand said NYU told her the teacher would be suspended following an investigation. “They are also aware that one of our members filed a complaint against them which is a good thing,” she wrote, adding that the NYU official “knew I had the attention of so many active members and wanted to fill me in” about other steps the school would announce in the near future.

One member of the Facebook group credited Rand for her work. “Simply awesome. And everyone one of us in this group knows that if you hadn’t put all this together, the prof would not have been suspended and NYU would not even be discussing any consequences. Nice work!!”

Rand has been vocal about NYU policy specifically when it pertains to her son.

Screenshots show Rand discussing a successful effort to convince the school to get her son a new roommate; other MACA members asked her to put in a word for their kids who were having roommate problems as well. “I did a deep dive into the person, saw they were fundraising for Gaza and got my kid switched out immediately,” Rand wrote.

Rand said she’d since gotten two emails from Mills and another NYU staffer asking her to let them know if her son had any issues or wanted anything. In another post, Rand shared an emoji laughing and crying and wrote, “And just like that,” her son “got his own room.” 

Beckman, the NYU spokesperson, said requests to change roommates are common, with more than 120 such changes happening prior to check-in this semester.

NYU notified Rand’s son in an email earlier this month that he had been called into a disciplinary conduct meeting in relation to the library protests, according to screenshots of the email posted to the Facebook group by Rand and shared with The Intercept. Rand’s posts suggest her son was filmed walking near the protest. NYU would not comment on individual student disciplinary proceedings.

After Rand emailed Mills to ask that the school apologize and drop the meeting, it did. 

Rand said her son would not participate in Gaza protests and reminded Mills that she could leverage her Facebook group to bring negative media attention to the school. “He has zero interest in protesting Gaza and zero sympathy for the obnoxious, loud, disillusioned, miserable individuals disturbing people who are there to get an education,” Rand wrote. “I’m completely outraged. Do you find this ironic? The 62,000 members of MACA do and they plan on giving this story media coverage to expose it for the farce that it is.” 

The president apologized in an email to Rand. “We are looking into it as we speak and rest assured that we understand that [Rand’s son] was not part of the protest,” Mills wrote on January 13. 

Shortly afterward, Mills emailed again to say the meeting had been canceled. “This request for a conversation has been dropped — again, I’m so sorry this happened. Please know that the team has taken this entire investigation very seriously,” Mills wrote. She concluded the note writing that Rand’s son “will receive confirmation that this has been dropped tomorrow. — L.”

“This is the power of MACA. Not the power of me, the power of us,” Rand wrote in a celebratory post sharing screenshots of her emails with Mills about her son. 

After Rand shared the exchange on the Facebook group, one member asked Rand for an update on the disciplinary meeting. “I told them that 62,000 people knew about this and they were about to get media coverage,” Rand replied. “A half hour later they emailed, apologized and he got something apologizing and removing it from his record.” 

Rand’s messages with Mills illustrate a fundamental problem at the highest levels of NYU leadership, said Rebecca E. Karl, immediate past president of AAUP-NYU and current member-at-large. 

“NYU’s administration has very clearly bypassed and thus undermined norms of academic freedom, faculty governance, and due process,” Karl, a history professor at NYU, said. “Mills’ interventions demonstrate a serious lack of judgement and a clear bias.” 

While Rand portrays herself as fighting antisemitism on campus, her online content is at times Islamophobic, the NYU professors who spoke with The Intercept said. “It’s truly offensive stuff,” Samalin said. 

Rand has shared Instagram videos of herself confronting protesters and discussing Islamophobia. “What is Islamophobia?” Rand asked in one video posted to Instagram in September. “Is that the fear of planes flying into buildings? Is that the fear of being killed at a music festival? Is that the fear of violence and terror? Because if that’s what Islamophobia is, I have it.”

Rand removed the post after The Intercept reached out for comment. 

In a podcast episode last year, Rand suggested that there was a problem with the number of women wearing hijabs in New York City. Rand said she was “baffled” and scared. “I noticed that in New York, suddenly, there is this humongous amount of women in hijabs,” she said. “I feel constantly on edge. And I didn’t used to feel that way at all,” she said. “I didn’t really feel any anti-Muslim bias or anything. But lately I feel, I guess like, frightened. Not hatred or anything, just scared.” 

Beckman, the NYU spokesperson, said, “We do not monitor nor do we comment on the social media postings of the parents of the University’s 50,000+ students, though, naturally we hope that everyone connected to the University, even in the broadest sense, will embrace the University’s traditions of peaceful, respectful, reasoned dialogue.”

When news broke Wednesday of Trump’s plan to sign a more targeted executive order, Rand shared an article about the order to the MACA group. Members applauded the news: “YES!!!!!!!!” one person wrote. Another commented “Wow!” and a third person posted a personalized emoji of herself celebrating with the words “Woohoo!” 

The order, which Trump signed Wednesday, sets forth a policy “to combat anti-Semitism vigorously, using all available appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment violence.”

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The order directs the heads of executive departments or agencies to submit a report to the president within 60 days to identify “all civil and criminal authorities or actions” within their jurisdiction “that might be used to curb or combat anti-Semitism” on college campuses. It directs the attorney general to combat antisemitism using its relevant civil rights enforcement authorities, providing as an example the law prohibiting conspiracy against rights, under which violators are set to receive a fine or prison time. 

The order also directs the secretaries of state, education, and homeland security to work together to recommend that universities familiarize themselves with federal immigration law proscribing visas or entry into the U.S. so they can “monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff.” The agencies are also tasked with recommending ways to best ensure that their reports lead, under applicable law, “to investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove such aliens.” 

When comparing NYU’s interactions with Rand to its reaction to students demonstrating against the war on Gaza, Samalin and Karl see a case of preferential treatment. NYU has disciplined and suspended pro-Palestine students, and issued “persona non grata” status to three faculty members last month, barring their access to campus buildings. Samalin also said its administrators have resisted meeting with members of its academic community who have been demanding NYU’s divestment from Israel since 2023, though the school entered into negotiations with protesters in April. At the same time, Mills has been personally corresponding with a parent over matters of discipline. 

“This question of access to her is itself bound up with questions about punishment and discrimination on campus,” Samalin said.

“There’s very little confidence in the disciplinary process at our school,” Samalin said. “And this could be the final straw because it’s just so obvious that there’s this double standard that applies.”

The post A Well-Connected NYU Parent Is Trying to Get Students Deported appeared first on The Intercept.

The suspended students included students who happened to be studying in Butler Library at the time the occupation began, as well as journalists. The suspensions came amid final exams at the university. Some of the students who were not protesting have had their suspensions rescinded.

Barnard College informed suspended students that they would have to vacate their college housing within 48 hours and that their meal cards would be voided. The housing deadline was set to pass on Saturday, but Barnard said in a statement that no one had been evicted yet.

The Intercept spoke to several people who were put under interim suspensions, including a Barnard student who said that she and another student were suspended and given eviction notices before they had the chance to prove to the college that they had not been involved in the protest.

“Hasty punishments and violations of due process are exactly what we would expect.”

The stark and immediate punishments were meted out before the students were given a chance to respond, in what faculty members call a clear violation of due process related to the sensitivities over protests against the university’s ties to Israel amid its war on Gaza.

“Hasty punishments and violations of due process are exactly what we would expect when we allow our disciplinary and public safety policies to be dictated by political forces that value repression more than our community’s well-being,” Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics at Columbia University, told The Intercept.

​Yannik Thiem, an associate professor of religion at Columbia who taught some of the suspended students, told The Intercept, “The blanket move to interim suspend, without a process to establish that the students actually violated the rules in a way that warrants this kind of punishment, and to evict them, seem to be punitive measures that indicate that the students are presumed guilty until proven innocent.”

At least six students from Columbia and Barnard — including four journalists and, according to a student and faculty members, two who were merely studying at Butler Library — have had their suspensions and eviction notices lifted since the punishments were handed down Thursday. 

Asked about its suspensions, punishments, and allegations that due process was falling by the wayside, a spokesperson for Barnard said, “Barnard respects and supports a robust student press. As students present in Butler Library during the disruption have been confirmed to be working as journalists, we have notified them that their interim suspensions have been lifted. As our review continues, we will issue additional notifications as necessary.”

“Initial interim suspensions were based solely on the time students exited Butler Library,” the spokesperson said. “Students who were able to demonstrate that they were not participants, despite remaining in the library after being directed to leave, have had their suspensions promptly lifted. No student has been required to leave campus housing as a result of an interim suspension.”

“Intense and Intimidating”

Among the students who had their suspensions reversed was Samra Moosa, a 20-year-old Barnard College student. Moosa spent the morning of May 7 working on her assignments in Butler Library’s reading room. 

Around 3:15 p.m., just after Moosa had returned from a lunch break, around 100 protesters began a pro-Palestine protest in the library. Shortly after, Columbia-employed campus security officers arrived.

Moosa tried to leave when the protesters came in, but said the main exits were blocked by both protesters and campus security. 

“The environment quickly became very intense and intimidating,” Moosa said. “We clearly witnessed Public Safety pushing and being very aggressive towards student protesters and obviously, in my mind, there’s no way I’m leaving through the front doors with Public Safety literally pushing at anyone.”

Moosa said she was also worried that, as a brown woman, Columbia’s Public Safety might assume she was a protester. 

Some students, Moosa said, kept studying around the reading room as the protest continued. Others attempted to leave through the exits but were required to show their IDs first.

“I complied because I literally was a student just studying.”

Shortly after 4 p.m., as the protest continued, Moosa attempted to leave through a side exit of the reading room. Along with other students trying to leave, she was told by a security officer that she would have to show her ID in order to leave. 

“So I complied because I literally was a student just studying and I showed her my ID,” Moosa said.

On her way out, Moosa said, the Public Safety officer snapped a photo of her ID.

Moosa said she left the library of her own accord, never receiving any order, verbal or written, to evacuate the library while she was in the building. 

At 6:02 p.m., about two hours after leaving the library, a university-wide email alert came from Columbia Public Safety: “Alert: Butler Library is closed and the area must be cleared.”

“No Evidence”

On May 8, the day after the protest, Moosa received an email from Barnard Dean Leslie Grinage that she had been suspended “effective immediately.” The decision, said the email, which was reviewed by The Intercept, stemmed from “information received from Columbia University Public Safety” that Moosa was “involved in a disruption” at the library the day before.

Within 48 hours, Moosa would have to evacuate her on-campus housing. “We understand that losing access to the residence hall you are assigned to,” the email continued, “is inconvenient and may pose a hardship.” Barnard added that if complying with the 48-hour deadline “presents a hardship,” they might provide “additional flexibility and support in leaving the residence hall.”

A well-placed source with knowledge of the mediation proceedings between the university and those present inside Butler Library told The Intercept that the working assumption that day was that the students who presented their IDs and identified themselves while leaving the library would get due process if disciplinary proceedings were initiated. The source requested anonymity over concerns of retaliation.

The suspension, according to Grinage’s email, was instituted because of alleged violations of Barnard’s Student Code of Conduct, which governs typical disciplinary proceedings. The email went on, however, to suggest that the punishments were separate from the normal processes. 

“This interim suspension does not replace the Barnard Student Code of Conduct process, which will begin as soon as possible,” it said. “The College has not yet made a determination about your responsibility for any alleged violations of the Code at this time or the resulting sanctions if you are found responsible.”

Moosa, who is Muslim, replied to Grinage in short order, requesting that her suspension be lifted. 

“I am deeply concerned that I have been mistakenly and unfairly identified as a protest participant,” she wrote. “I believe this may be due to assumptions based on my appearance, ethnic background, and religion. To be clear, I did not participate in the protest, nor did I engage in any disruption.”

She added that, on the contrary, she had “acted responsibly” to remove herself from the situation “as soon as it was safe to do so.”

Moosa met on Friday afternoon with Grinage, less than 24 hours after she’d received the initial suspension notice — and just 24 hours before her scheduled eviction.

“It’s as if she has no evidence, she has nothing on me, but they’re actively trying to find something.”

At the meeting, Moosa said, she read to Grinage from a prepared statement: “This accusation has caused me significant emotional distress and disrupted my ability to complete my final assignments. As a Muslim woman, I feel that Barnard has repeatedly failed to create a safe and supportive environment for students like myself. It is unacceptable for the College to claim inclusivity while subjecting students of color to racial profiling and false accusations.”

By the time evening fell, Moosa had still not received a judgment on her case. She had begun packing up her dorm room. At 9:32 p.m., Moosa received an email from Grinage that her suspension had been withdrawn. Moosa, however, was not in the clear: “Barnard reserves the right to reimpose interim sanctions and/or initiate charges regarding this matter at any point in the future,” wrote Grinage.

For Moosa, the email read like a threat. 

“It’s as if she has no evidence, she has nothing on me,” Moosa said, “but they’re actively trying to find something to pin me to the protests.”

Trump Crackdown

The Butler Library protest and sweeping responses came amid an all-out assault against universities — particularly Columbia, which has been flashpoints of campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza — by the Trump administration. Decrying virtually any pro-Palestine position as anti-Jewish animus, the administration formed a Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism to lead its crackdown.

Among other controversial measures — such as demands on its Middle East studies department that faculty members said flew in the face of academic independence — the administration withdrew hundreds of millions in funding from Columbia. 

On the same day that Columbia and Barnard announced the suspensions, including those targeting non-protesters and student journalists, the Trump administration’s task force heaped praise on the university administration and Claire Shipman, its new acting president, for their response to the protest.

The task force said it was “encouraged by Acting President Shipman’s strong and resolute statement regarding the unlawful, violent and disgraceful takeover of Butler library” and that she had “met the moment with fortitude and conviction.”

The task force added that it was “confident that Columbia will take the appropriate disciplinary actions for those involved in this act.”

Howley, the classics professor, linked the school’s heavy-handed response to the protests to the threats over its funding. 

“It turns out a university might not be able to uphold its own values when authoritarians hold a billion-dollar gun to its head,” he said.

“It turns out a university might not be able to uphold its own values when authoritarians hold a billion-dollar gun to its head.”

In a video released Wednesday evening, Shipman said she had “confidence the disciplinary proceedings will reflect the severity of the actions.”

The Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors said in a statement on Thursday that there is a “countervailing and urgent need” to “ensure due process for all parties.”

Barnard “treats students guilty before they have a chance to prove themselves innocent,” a professor at the school who asked to not be named due to concerns over retaliation told The Intercept. “It is the most cynical interpretation of due process under their own ‘more likely than not’ standard that they insist is educational and not punitive.”

The hasty suspensions and evictions, with lapses in due process, are not new to Barnard. Following the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia last April, Barnard suspended at least 53 students and evicted them from their dorms, barred them from campus, and revoked their access to campus dining. Some suspended students were given a mere 15 minutes to pack up and leave their housing. Their suspension notices had said that a campus security official “will escort you to your room, and you will have 15 minutes to gather what you might need.”

Such precedents at Columbia and Barnard have left students especially uneasy.

Moosa said that, given the manner in which Barnard acted, she feels that the college is still holding the threat of suspension over her head. 

“I don’t feel relieved,” she said, of having her suspension revoked. “I haven’t done anything to prove to this college that I am a danger to this campus.”

The post Students Studying at Columbia Library Were Suspended for Protest They Took No Part In appeared first on The Intercept.

Instead, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him and began the process to deport him to the occupied West Bank. Mahdawi, a leader of the campus protest movement against Israel’s war on Gaza, became yet another green card holder arrested and facing removal.

“Mohsen Mahdawi was unlawfully detained today for no reason other than his Palestinian identity,” Mahdawi’s attorney Luna Droubi said in a statement to The Intercept. “He came to this country hoping to be free to speak out about the atrocities he has witnessed, only to be punished for such speech.” 

Mahdawi’s lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition on Monday morning challenging the legality of his detention, alleging the government was violating his statutory and due process rights by punishing him for speech related to Palestine and Israel. The filing said it appears that Mahdawi was facing deportation under the obscure provision used in other recent cases that gives Secretary of State Marco Rubio the right to unilaterally declare immigrants as threats to American foreign policy.

A federal judge signed a temporary restraining order on Monday to keep Mahdawi from being moved out of Vermont while his case is pending.

EXCLUSIVE FOOTAGE: Columbia student and Palestinian Mohsen Madawi was just arrested during a visit to the immigration office here in Colchester, VT. More to follow. Footage by: Christopher Helali pic.twitter.com/I9JvPS2DLn

— Christopher Helali (@ChrisHelali) April 14, 2025

Mahdawi was one of the leaders of the pro-Palestine student protest movement until spring 2024, when he said he took a step back from the movement to focus on building bridges with Jewish and Israeli communities on campus.

In December 2023, Mahdawi asked Columbia professor Shai Davidai, a controversial pro-Israel figure at the school, to get coffee. The two met, but Mahdawi later said that Davidai left in the middle of the coffee. Less than two months after the meeting, Davidai posted a video of Mahdawi to Twitter in a thread characterizing him and other protest organizers as antisemitic and pro-Hamas. (Davidai did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) 

Since then, Mahdawi became a focus of attacks from a member of Congress and Zionist groups like Canary Mission and Betar.

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The Columbia Network Pushing Behind the Scenes to Deport and Arrest Student Protesters

With Donald Trump’s inauguration, groups like Betar and Canary Mission have been at the center of a push to place scrutiny on foreign students active in campus pro-Palestine movements. At Columbia, one behind-the-scenes push came from a WhatsApp group that included alumni and faculty who organized to get the students deported. Davidai was a member of the group, though there’s no indication he participated in talk of deportation, whether about Mahdawi or other students.

Even before his friend and fellow Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by immigration authorities, Mahdawi asked university administrators to help him find a safe place to live so he would not be taken by ICE agents, according to emails reviewed by The Intercept. The school did nothing in response, Mahdawi said.

After ICE abducted Khalil last month, Mahdawi sheltered in place for more than three weeks for fear of being picked up himself. 

Instead of taking him off the street, however, immigration authorities scheduled the citizenship test at the Colchester USCIS office and took Mahdawi into custody when he arrived.

Now, Mahdawi is facing an order to deport him to the occupied West Bank, where escalating attacks from both the Israeli military and Jewish settlers have led to increased casualties among Palestinians.

“It’s kind of a death sentence,” Mahdawi said. “Because my people are being killed unjustly in an indiscriminate way.” 

His fears arise from the toll Israel’s attacks and occupation have taken on Mahdawi’s family. Growing up in the West Bank, his community has suffered losses for years. He said he lost his childhood best friend, his uncle, two cousins, several of whom were killed in the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against occupation that lasted from 2000 to 2005. 

“I will be either living or imprisoned or killed by the apartheid system.”

More recently, he lost two cousins in the growing violence in the occupied Palestinian territories since the October 7 attacks, Mahdawi said. His aunts and uncles’ homes have been destroyed, and his father’s store was blown up as part of the violence in the West Bank city of Jenin.

Now, he is the ninth Columbia student targeted for deportation as hundreds across the country have had their visas revoked under the Trump administration’s sweeps and abductions of immigrants. Mahdawi is one of the few cases of legal permanent residents arrested, meaning he did not have a student visa revoked but is facing an effort by the government to cancel his green card. Other permanent residents have faced deportation over allegations that they violated immigration law or had their residency revoked over pro-Palestinian views.

“This is the outcome,” Mahdawi said. “I will be either living or imprisoned or killed by the apartheid system.” 

Attacks and Government Scrutiny

In December 2023, Mahdawi appeared in a “60 Minutes” segment focused on antisemitism on college campuses. 

Mahdawi criticized how Columbia’s then-President Minouche Shafik had responded to the October 7 attacks, saying that she was ignoring the plight of Palestinians. And, a past leader of Columbia’s Palestinian student union, Mahdawi said pro-Israel factions on campus wanted to silence those protesting genocide. 

In the wake of the interview, he became the subject of increasing surveillance and attacks from Zionist groups. He said he also started receiving death threats. Canary Mission and StopAntisemitism, two Zionist groups that have become hubs for doxing and bullying of Palestine solidarity activists, created profiles for him. The profiles claimed that Mahdawi — whose activist work centered on finding peaceful resolutions to conflicts between Israelis, American Jews, and Palestinians — was anti-Israel and pro-Hamas.

By late 2024, Mahdawi was visited at his apartment by an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force official. Mahdawi said he is still unsure of the purpose of the FBI visit. Mahdawi said Columbia refused to provide him with video footage of his apartment complex capturing the visit. (Columbia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Then, in early 2025, Trump formalized his plans to deport pro-Palestine student protesters with an executive order.

Shortly after, Betar, which said it sent a list of students it wanted deported to the White House, posted about Mahdawi. So did the group Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at ColumbiaU, which is run by a member of the pro-Israel WhatsApp group that worked to deport students. The group posted multiple times about Mahdawi and other organizers, tagging law enforcement agencies.

Shortly afterward, Mahdawi went into hiding. In response to a final email last month pleading with the school to move him to a safe location, a high-ranking official in the Columbia administration wrote, “The University’s outside counsel will be in touch with your counsel.” Mahdawi’s lawyer said Columbia responded and said they could not give him safe campus housing where he would be better insulated from ICE.

Last month, Betar posted about Mahdawi again. The group said Mahdawi was part of a group of students Betar was confident would “shortly be deported.” 

Earlier this month, Mahdawi received an email from USCIS notifying him that he was scheduled to conduct an interview to obtain his U.S. citizenship. He said he was expecting the interview to take place in December or January, in line with the expected timeline to move from his green card status through the naturalization process. When he received the email, however, he was worried it might be a trap. 

In anticipation of the worst, Mahdawi contacted his representatives in Congress, including Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., as well as Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., to make them aware of his situation and ask them to intervene if possible. 

Mahdawi said he spoke personally with Welch, who said his office would be on standby pending what happened with Mahdawi’s case. Offices for Sanders and Balint said they would remain on standby pending news of Mahdawi’s status after the interview. (Welch, Sanders, and Balint did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Mahdawi said the government’s efforts to chill speech went beyond issues related to Israel or Palestine. 

“That’s why they’re crushing universities now, it’s not only about Palestine,” Mahdawi said. 

As for his hopes of becoming a U.S. citizen one day and continuing his master’s degree studies at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, Mahdawi’s future is unclear. 

“People ask me why I would want to become a citizen of a country committing genocide,” Mahdawi said. “I have faith in the people living in this country. The government is not the people.”

Update: April 14, 2025, 5:40 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a filing made by Mohsen Mahdawi’s legal team challenging his detention and a restraining order from a federal judge prohibiting the government from moving him out of Vermont.

The post Palestinian Student Leader Was Called In for Citizenship Interview — Then Arrested by ICE appeared first on The Intercept.