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.

The letters, which were sent on October 14 to the presidents and provosts of Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown, Minnesota State, and Tufts universities, called out school officials and U.S. law enforcement agencies for cracking down on student protesters and subsequently using immigration authorities to single out foreign students for detention and deportation.

“We are highly concerned over reports that students were arrested, suspended, and expelled, and lost their university accommodation, campus access, and their immigration status merely because of assembling peacefully to express their solidarity with victims of the conflict in Gaza,” wrote the group of U.N. special rapporteurs, independent experts who monitor human rights violations. “We fear that such pressure and public attacks on scholars and institutions can result in repression of free expression and in self-censorship, thus damaging academic freedom and the autonomy of universities.”

The letters suggest the international body has taken notice of domestic protest repression on U.S. campuses. Since President Donald Trump returned to office, his administration has weaponized immigration authorities against international students and investigations over alleged antisemitism at universities across the country — ratcheting up a crackdown on student protests for Palestine that began under former President Joe Biden.

The letter to Columbia highlighted the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Leqaa Kordia, as well as the attempted arrest of Yunseo Chung. (Columbia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Khalil and Mahdawi both spent months in detention earlier this year. Kordia, a Palestinian student who was arrested on March 8, was still in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody as recently as December 8, according to a report by Drop Site News.

“It has been reported that the conditions of Ms. Kordia’s detention are particularly severe. Due to overcrowding, she sleeps on the floor where cockroaches and other bugs abound, and many showers and sinks do not work,” the authors wrote. “She is also not given materials her faith requires to have to pray, and she is not allowed to wear a hijab in the presence of men as her religion requires.”

The authors of the letter include Mary Lawlor, the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders; Farida Shaheed, the special rapporteur on the right to education; Irene Khan, the special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression; Gina Romero, the special rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association; and Gehad Madi, the special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants. Representatives of the U.N. rapporteurs who drafted the letters did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

The U.N. letter also highlighted the cases of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student at Tufts who was snatched by masked ICE agents on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts, on March 25; Badar Khan Suri, the Indian-born researcher at Georgetown arrested on March 17; Momodou Taal, a Cornell grad student with dual citizenship from the United Kingdom and Gambia who was ordered to turn himself in to ICE agents on March 22; and Mohammed Hoque, a Minnesota State student arrested at his home on March 28. (Cornell, Minnesota State, and Tufts did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

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How Columbia’s Leadership Refashioned the University in Trump’s Image

In the letter, the authors singled out Columbia for bowing to pressure from the Trump administration, which they said set a standard that chilled speech nationwide.

“The restrictive measures at Columbia University reflect nationwide structural changes at universities to suppress Palestine solidarity movements,” the authors wrote.

In each letter, the authors asked the universities to provide information on the allegations of mistreatment, any measures taken by the schools to protect the rights of its students and scholars, and details on how the schools plan to safeguard the rights to freedom of expression and assembly.

“Students report self-censoring political expression, and particularly international students are withdrawing from activism due to deportation fears,” the authors wrote. “Campus organizing has diminished significantly, with activists reporting less attendance from international students who had to quit their activism because of the potential risk of repercussions. This intimidating effect extends beyond issues concerning Israel and Palestine, with students reporting reluctance to engage in any political activism.”

The post U.N. Experts Blast U.S. Universities for Human Rights Violations Against Gaza Protesters 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.

At the height of the school’s encampment against Israel’s war on Gaza last spring, one of hundreds across the country, a mob of pro-Israel protesters attacked pro-Palestine protesters for more than four hours. On the night of April 30, 2024, police stood by and watched as counter-protesters aimed and shot fireworks, sprayed chemical agents, harassed, and sexually assaulted pro-Palestine protesters, students and faculty alleged last month in a separate, ongoing lawsuit. 

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The day after the melee, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, UCLA administrators, and seven different law enforcement agencies laid plans to dismantle the school’s encampment for good. 

UCLA invited multiple outside police forces to campus to clear the encampments on May 1. More than 700 police officers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, California Highway Patrol, the University of California Police Department, and private security were on campus the night of the raid. 

Protesters are now suing the state of California, which oversees California Highway Patrol, and the city of Los Angeles, which oversees the LAPD, for violence against the demonstrations. The police fired more than 50 rounds of rubber bullets at protesters, striking several people in the head; some of the injuries sent demonstrators to the hospital.

The projectiles shattered bones in one student’s hand and required her to undergo surgery and extensive rehab. Another person, who police shot in the head, was diagnosed with internal bleeding. (The governor’s office referred questions to California Highway Patrol. CHP and LAPD said they would not comment on pending legislation. UCLA did not respond to a request for comment.)

“If you want to talk about fascism, they deployed a police state on campuses all across California.”

A lawyer for the protesters said it was important to hold Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, often mentioned as possible future party leaders, to account because, though the governing authorities are Democrats, their actions against the protesters helped give rise to Donald Trump’s extreme crackdown.

“These attacks also happened in Democratic-run cities and blue states,” said attorney Ricci Sergienko, who filed the suit on Thursday. “That is a clear, direct path to what’s happening now with Trump, because the Democratic Party and their leaders made enemies out of these young people.” 

“If you want to talk about fascism, they deployed a police state on campuses all across California,” Sergienko said. “We want to talk about what fascism is, and authoritarian repression and suppression — that is modeled here in California.”

Rules on Rubber Bullets

The new lawsuit says police violated that law and protesters’ rights under the state constitution when they attacked people at the encampment last May. 

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Police Attacks on Protesters With “Less Than Lethal” Weapons Result in Life-Threatening Injuries

After protests against police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, police took heavy criticism for repeatedly shooting protesters with rubber or foam bullets, even losing a major lawsuit over the issue. Agencies like the LAPD and LA Sheriff’s Department faced injunctions restricting the use of weapons like rubber bullets — also known as 40-millimeter kinetic impact projectiles. 

In California, lawmakers responded by passing a law that prohibited officers from using the projectiles against protests unless the situation presented an objective, reasonable defense against a threat to life or serious injury. 

In the wake of the 2020 protests, UCLA also changed its guidelines to prioritize deescalation tactics and minimize use of outside police forces on campus. 

California Highway Patrol, on the other hand, responds less frequently to protests and was not accused of using similar weapons in 2020. CHP officers nonetheless stormed UCLA encampments last spring and fired more than 50 rounds of the kinetic impact projectiles, said Becca Brown, another attorney working on the lawsuit. 

“LAPD did it as well, but they did not use them quite as heavily as CHP,” Brown said. 

The new California law restricts the indiscriminate use of rubber bullets into a crowd because they can be — and have been — deadly, Brown explained. 

“They cannot be used indiscriminately,” she said. “They cannot be used simply because someone is non-compliant.” 

Following criticism, police offered justifications for the use of force in some cases, according to an LAPD after-action report on the agency’s response to the UCLA encampments. Examples included someone throwing a traffic cone at police or removing an officer’s helmet. 

The report offered several recommendations for the LAPD, including proper reporting of use-of-force incidents and the need for clear commands from police leaders. The report called on the police to improve communication between agencies because LAPD officers “did not appear to have a clear understanding of their mission.” 

Plaintiffs in the suit include a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA, an undergraduate student, another college student, and an architectural designer. Police shot all three of them with rubber bullets and hit several of them in the head. 

The police attack on the protests has had effects beyond the physical, the complaint says, and has caused plaintiffs to reconsider exercising their First Amendment rights to demonstrate against Israel’s war on Gaza. The protesters are also concerned that if they participate in future protests, they’ll be subject to further attacks from the state and police. 

“The encampment clearance by means of violence, excessive force, and kinetic energy projectiles traumatized Plaintiffs, chilled their protest activity, and justifiably made them less willing to engage in any further Palestine-related protest activity,” the complaint says. “This was the natural consequence of the dramatic and violent clearing organized and carried out by CHP and LAPD, which would have certainly chilled any ordinary person from engaging in Palestine solidarity advocacy in the future.” 

One plaintiff, UCLA Ph.D. candidate Abdullah Puckett, “has become more hesitant and afraid of continuing his participation in protests,” the complaint said. “He now feels that he must reconsider whether he can participate in protests and if so, to what extent he can participate. He now fears that he will experience violent retaliation at the hands of law enforcement if he participates in protests.”

UCLA Gaza Crackdown

Police arrested more than 200 people as a result of the UCLA encampment. The LAPD, which had a $3.2 billion budget last year, sought more than half a million dollars in reimbursement from the governor’s office for the response, in part for more than 2,400 overtime hours, the Daily Bruin reported.

“How are they supposed to go back to campus and feel safe?”

Arrested students wound up with criminal records. Those records are now being used by the Trump administration to target students for abduction and deportation.

“For international students that may have been arrested at any of these encampments, they then had that on their record, which led to the Trump administration running background checks on international students,” said Sergienko, the lawyer. “And if they had gotten arrested at an encampment, that got flagged and could be subject to deportation under Trump’s fascist policies.” 

California’s Democratic lawmakers are now pushing for a bill that amounts to an “educational gag order” targeting ethnic studies classes over concerns about antisemitism. 

“That’s another attack on speech coming from the blue state, the liberal paradise of California,” Sergienko said. 

“A real question is, how are students supposed to feel safe on campus knowing that the administration would call in a thousand school shooters to come attack them while on campus?” Sergienko said. “How are they supposed to go back to campus and feel safe? 

On Wednesday night, UCLA students showed “The Encampments,” a documentary released earlier this year. The school called in the LAPD to break up the screening. Police arrested three students.

Update: May 5, 2025, 10:53 a.m. ET
This story has been updated to include responses to requests for comment received after publication from the Los Angeles Police Department and the California Highway Patrol.

The post Police Shot Them in the Head With Rubber Bullets. Now UCLA Gaza Protesters Are Suing. appeared first on The Intercept.

The judge had previously ruled that Khalil could not be held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement based on a vague federal statute focused on potential “adverse foreign policy consequences” of his presence in the country. The latest ruling rejected the government’s arguments that Khalil, who missed the birth of his son while in detention, posed a flight risk, much less a danger to the community.

“No one should fear being jailed for speaking out in this country,” said Alina Das, co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University School of Law, who represented Khalil in court, in an emailed statement. “We are overjoyed that Mr. Khalil will finally be reunited with his family while we continue to fight his case in court.”

Khalil’s case is just the latest instance in which federal courts have ruled against the Trump administration’s dogged efforts to detain and deport noncitizens who protested Israel’s war in Gaza, many of them students who are in the U.S. on visas or green cards.

One under-scrutinized federal agency has been crucial to this effort: Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which markets itself as an elite force that targets human traffickers, drug smugglers, and war criminals. But under the second Trump administration, HSI has turned its surveillance apparatus on a different kind of target: noncitizens on college campuses with critical views of Israel.

As it built dossiers on Khalil and others, HSI deployed its full suite of investigative tools and techniques to “identify individuals within the parameters” of President Donald Trump’s executive orders about rooting out purported antisemitism, as one HSI agent explained in an affidavit.

For each target, HSI agents used surveillance tools to build a dossier, which was then passed to the State Department to confirm that the target was, in the eyes of the U.S. government, sufficiently antisemitic to be deported.

To track down protesters for arrest, HSI agents conducted “pattern of life” surveillance, The Intercept found, which meant monitoring targets’ movements and associates. HSI agents executed search warrants on college dorms based on flimsy affidavits, issued subpoenas for financial records and other data, and even put a trace on one target’s WhatsApp account.

“It’s notable that these components, which purportedly focus on threats to national security and public safety, are spending their time hunting down student protesters for their protected speech,” said Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which is suing the Trump administration for targeting pro-Palestinian campus activists. “From what I’ve seen, the government hasn’t made a plausible argument that these students actually pose a threat to the national security of the United States.”

For years, watchdogs have warned that Congress needs to rein in HSI. During the first Trump administration, HSI monitored protest plans, called in aerial surveillance of the George Floyd demonstrations, and helped compile a database of journalists and immigration advocates to target at the border.

When Trump returned to the White House in January, HSI wasted little time in using its broad, fuzzy authority to target and track down critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.

“HSI has a really broad, often unchecked authority that in moments like these can allow them to turn it into a weapon,” said Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, who previously worked as senior intelligence counsel in the Department of Homeland Security.

“The Department does little to promote oversight and accountability of its operations,” Reynolds said of HSI, pointing to the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate or defang DHS’s civil liberties office as amplifying the risks of abuse.

“We’ve seen this happen in the past,” Reynolds said, “and it can result in abusive targeting.”

ICE did not respond to The Intercept’s questions for this story.

HSI sprang into action in late January, after Trump issued an executive order purportedly aimed at antisemitism, according to an affidavit filed by a high-ranking HSI official in the case of Momodou Taal, a Cornell University grad student.

HSI investigators launched a “proactive” review of “open-source information to identify individuals subject to the Executive Order,” wrote Roy M. Stanley III, who leads the counterterrorism unit within HSI’s Office of Intelligence. As part of this review, HSI conducted “targeted analysis to substantiate aliens’ alleged engagement of antisemitic activities.”

In the Knight Institute’s lawsuit, another official, Andre Watson, who leads HSI’s national security division, explained that “HSI Office of Intelligence proactively reviews open-source information to identify individuals within the parameters of” Trump’s executive order.

“The HSI Office of Intelligence is typically focused on identifying actual security threats,” said DeCell of the Knight Institute.

And just because the underlying information is open source, meaning available on the public internet, DeCell explained, “doesn’t mean the government isn’t using more advanced tech as part of its “boil the ocean” approach to surveillance.”

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In fact, ICE officials’ references to “open-source” searches potentially refer to HSI’s massive database, called RAVEn, said Reynolds, of the Brennan Center. RAVEn uses large-language models to collate material from across ICE’s systems and the public internet, including social media posts and news stories.

For Taal, HSI’s open-source trawl turned up online articles about his participation in Gaza protests and run-ins with the Cornell administration. In mid-March, HSI referred its findings to the State Department, which revoked Taal’s visa the same day, according to other court filings.

After initially filing suit to challenge the revocation of his visa, Taal decided to leave the U.S. in late March rather than risk being detained like Khalil.

Court records across multiple cases reflect this general workflow: HSI agents use surveillance tools to build a dossier — an “HSI Subject Profile,” as Secretary of State Marco Rubio referred to them in memos.

“There seems to be a two-way street here” between HSI and the State Department, DeCell noted, by which HSI agents provide reports that “support the State Department’s decision to revoke a visa.”

HSI drafted “subject profiles” on Khalil and at least two other Columbia students targeted for their ties to Gaza protests, court records show: Yunseo Chung and Mohsen Mahdawi.

In many cases, Rubio quickly ratified HSI’s findings and ordered the targets should be deported under a rarely used provision for “adverse policy interests.” As in Taal’s case, Rubio signed off on the deportations of Khalil, Chung, and Mahdawi within 24 hours. He even did so in a single letter that gave ICE the green light to detain both Khalil and Chung.

But in some cases, HSI’s intel was a stretch even for Rubio’s staff.

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Marco Rubio Is Attacking American Education. International Students Are His Pawns.

HSI’s dossier on Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student, quoted from an op-ed she co-wrote calling on Tufts to “disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel,” the Washington Post reported. The State Department pushed back somewhat, determining the op-ed wasn’t sufficient evidence of antisemitic activity or support for a terrorism organization.

The State Department did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about whether Rubio’s staff had disagreed with HSI’s determinations as to any other targets beside Öztürk.

All the same, based on HSI’s threadbare findings, Öztürk’s visa could still be revoked at Rubio’s discretion, the State Department wrote in a reply memo later filed in court. “Due to ongoing ICE operational security, this revocation will be silent,” wrote John Armstrong of the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs to Watson on March 21. “The Department of State will not notify the subject of the revocation.”

Four days later, as Öztürk walked to a Ramadan dinner, six plain-clothed ICE agents surrounded her, placed her under arrest, and whisked her out of Massachusetts and ultimately to a detention center in Louisiana, where she was held for several weeks before a federal judge ordered her release in early May. 

Mahdawi also won his release in late April, which the federal government has appealed in tandem with Öztürk’s case. Despite HSI agents’ best efforts, Chung has never been detained, and earlier this month a federal judge issued an injunction that prohibits ICE from taking her into custody.

HSI has not just taken lead on flagging people who criticized Israel on university campuses, but also in tracking down and arresting them through various surveillance tactics.

In Khalil’s case, even before Rubio signed off on their findings, HSI placed Khalil under “pattern of life” surveillance, according to an immigration court filing. As an ICE attorney explained, this meant gathering information about Khalil’s “frequent locations, people he associates with, and various other information essential to law enforcement activities.”

When Rubio gave the go-ahead, HSI agents were already parked outside Khalil’s campus apartment in New York City. Despite not having an arrest warrant, they took him into custody and quickly hustled him to a facility in Louisiana.

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HSI special agents also staked out and arrested Badar Khan Suri, a scholar at Georgetown University, after Rubio determined he should be deported in mid-March. In May, a federal judge ordered his release.

When HSI struggled to locate targets, they used legal processes like subpoenas and search warrants to try to track them down.

In Chung’s case, ICE surveilled her campus apartment for five days and visited her parents’ home in Virginia but still couldn’t find her. So HSI agents sent administrative subpoenas to Columbia — seeking video footage from her dorm building and data showing when Chung swiped in and out of the building over an eight-day period, court records show.

Citing student privacy laws, a Columbia spokesperson would not answer whether the university complied with ICE’s administrative subpoenas, which would not be legally enforceable without a separate court order. “The University seeks legal advice for any type of warrant or subpoena, judicial or administrative,” the spokesperson wrote by email to The Intercept, adding that decisions about compliance “are made by the University after legal review to ensure there is a lawful requirement and, if so, the University must then comply.”

HSI agents also obtained and executed judicial search warrants for the dorm rooms of Chung and another Columbia student on the theory that Columbia was “harboring” them in violation of federal law.

The search warrant application materials, which were unsealed in mid-May, showed an assistant special agent in charge of HSI’s New York office filed a wildly inaccurate affidavit.

The affidavit misstated basic facts and federal law, attorneys told The Intercept, including that Chung, a lawful permanent resident with a green card, was in the country unlawfully.

When Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman who grew up in the West Bank, was arrested by New York City cops last spring at a Gaza demonstration at Columbia University, she was not a prominent activist or a recognizable leader in the student pro-Palestine movement like Khalil or Mahdawi.

She wasn’t even a Columbia student or otherwise affiliated with the school. Kordia had gone into the city for the day from her home in Paterson, New Jersey, she says in a lawsuit challenging her detention at an ICE facility in Texas.

Kordia was one of dozens of people arrested the same day in April 2024 that NYPD stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. Kordia was not part of the contingent of students who occupied the hall, but was arrested outside the closed campus gates after police told the crowd to disperse.

All charges against Kordia were later dropped without any court appearances. Her case was sealed, and her name did not make it into news coverage of the protest or onto lists by pro-Israel groups like Betar.

But her low profile didn’t stop Kordia, whose student visa had expired while her green card application was in process, from being targeted by HSI.

Early in March, HSI began investigating Kordia for “national security violations,” according to court records. And agents in HSI’s Newark office threw considerable investigative resources into profiling Kordia.

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HSI agents subpoenaed her financial records, put a trace on her WhatsApp account, and asked NYPD for records about her arrest. They interviewed Kordia’s mother, who is an American citizen; several of her acquaintances; and even the tenants of an apartment Kordia once rented.

In mid-March, the week after HSI agents arrested Khalil at his apartment on Columbia’s campus, they detained Kordia in New Jersey and flew her to the Texas detention center.

After the Department of Homeland Security put out a gleeful statement, Kordia quickly became known as the “second Columbia student” arrested by ICE over Gaza protests — even as Columbia made clear she was never enrolled. It’s a basic error that ICE still can’t keep straight, claiming in a recent press release that Kordia is “another Columbia Student who actively participated in anti-American, pro-terrorist activities on campus.”

Kordia remains in ICE detention thousands of miles from her family. Together with others targeted by HSI because of their ties to protests over Gaza, her case underscores the Trump administration’s commitment to targeting dissent with advanced surveillance tools and federal manpower.

“The government is deploying resources that are purportedly focused on identifying threats” but instead “rounding up students protesting on their own college campuses,” summarized the Knight Institute’s DeCell. “That raises significant First Amendment concerns, and it raises a chilling effect for anyone here in the U.S. on a visa.”

Correction: June 26, 2025
The story was updated to correct that Mohsen Mahdawi was released in late April, not May.

The post Mahmoud Khalil Won His Freedom Despite the Best Efforts of ICE’s Intelligence Unit appeared first on The Intercept.

In California, the Law Enforcement Mutual Aid Fund sets aside $25 million annually to let law enforcement agencies work across jurisdictions to fight natural disasters and other major emergencies. In a briefing obtained by The Intercept, acceptable LEMA use cases are listed as fires, storms, flooding, earthquakes, natural or man-made disasters, and “other extra ordinary events requiring emergency law enforcement mutual aid on a case by case basis.”

Leadership at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt — part of the California State University public school system — was able to tap these funds to bring outside law enforcement onto campus, The Intercept found in an investigative series on the university playbook for crushing pro-Palestine protests. Among more than 20,000 pages of documentation The Intercept obtained via public records requests, email after email from April and May 2024 show chiefs of police and administrators in California’s public universities asking outside law enforcement agencies to enter their campuses and clear encampments.

As “Gaza solidarity” encampments popped up across college campuses in April and May 2024, Jodi Lopez, staff services manager at California’s Office of Emergency Services, informed the leadership of at least 30 public universities — including Cal Poly Humboldt — that if they were to require mutual aid assistance, LEMA would be available to reimburse their expenses, attaching a flyer that detailed eligible costs.

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Cal Poly Humboldt students first entered and staged a peaceful sit-in at Siemens Hall on April 22. According to the documents obtained by The Intercept, leadership at the university was promptly in contact with local police departments about bringing the demonstration to an end. That day, police in riot gear attempted to enter the building and clear out the protesters, but students held them off. In an incident that would go viral on social media, a student could be seen on surveillance footage hitting officers on their helmets with an empty plastic water jug. The cops eventually withdrew from the building, marking the start of what would turn into an eight-day occupation.

Enlisting the help of Humboldt County’s Office of Emergency Services, the Eureka Police Department, and the University of California Police Department, Jackson’s email on April 25 requested assistance with “Reestablish[ing] control of university buildings and other property” and “eliminating the threat of domestic violent extremism and criminal behavior” on the part of the students — setting into motion the plan with which the cops ultimately cleared the hall. Ryan Derby, then head of the county OES, added in his mutual aid request that Cal Poly Humboldt would require the assistance of a total of 250 law enforcement officers, with “personnel for entry team trained in tactical room clearing and arrest and control.”

In a statement emailed to The Intercept, Cal Poly Humboldt spokesperson Aileen S. Yoo confirmed that the university “formally requested from the state Law Enforcement Officer support through the LEMA request process” and noted that “Cal Poly Humboldt remains firmly committed to upholding the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment, ensuring that all members of our community can speak, assemble, and express their views.”

A Cal OES spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Intercept that “Local law enforcement who provided that support to Cal Poly Humboldt were reimbursed through the LEMA Fund program.” The statewide office “is committed to protecting Californians and supporting local partners in times of crisis, regardless of political views or affiliation,” the spokesperson wrote.

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If there were ever a social contract between students and administrators at U.S. universities that allowed for the operation of insulated, on-campus police departments thought to be better attuned to the needs of students, that contract was shattered when universities nationwide brought in outside law enforcement to crush the student-led movement for Palestine, argued civil liberties advocates who spoke with The Intercept. A year before the Trump administration would step up efforts to use police power against public protest, the Palestine solidarity encampments made universities a test case for the tolerance of dissent — one that universities overwhelmingly failed.

“ I don’t even know if we can talk about the trust that students have in their universities. But if there was any trust, you ruin it when you bring in outside police to harm your own students,” said Sabiya Ahamed, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal.

As Jackson stated in his email, Cal Poly Humboldt’s budget was at stake. “Three large events and a dozen smaller events on campus have been canceled. Athletic events have been either canceled or moved off main campus,” he wrote. “If campus closure is required through the weekend, revenue loss will grow considerably.”

University and outside law enforcement would go on to arrest 25 students at Siemens Hall. Alongside over a dozen wildfires — including the deadly Palisades Fire, which destroyed more than 6,000 homes — the raid is currently listed on the LEMA website as an example of a case for which funding can be requested.

While it is far from a secret that outside law enforcement agencies were involved in the clearing of university pro-Palestine encampments, these terms of operation — and compensation — have never previously been reported on in detail. Communications between university officials and the outside agencies show that the process took shape in the smooth functioning of bureaucracy, with polite, breezy exchanges preceding violent crackdowns and raids.

As the pro-Palestine demonstrations continued, the practice of bringing outside law enforcement officers onto campus became increasingly normalized in the University of California system. On May 5, 2024, Lamine Secka, chief of police at UC San Diego, wrote to the California Highway Patrol: “Attached, please find a request for assistance to clear out a protest encampment on the UC San Diego campus.” CHP, acting with UCSD and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, would enter the campus in full riot gear on May 6, arresting dozens of student protesters. (It was not clear if LEMA funds covered that deployment, and UCSD did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)

The presence of outside law enforcement officers on campus fundamentally alters the power dynamics of a protest, said Ahamed of Palestine Legal. “ These police officers who are trained in violent tactics, you bring them to campus and they’re deploying those tactics against students. That is really dangerous,” she said.

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In some cases, that meant radicalizing students who watched militarized police forces haul their classmates away. In others, it meant injuring peaceful protesters — especially at the University of California Los Angeles, according to students and faculty who spoke with The Intercept. At UCLA, university administrators tapped state emergency services funds to bring in outside law enforcement officers and arrest countless students, with many injured. UCLA did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

“They were showing us the level of militarization within these departments,” Dylan Kupsh, a fifth-year Ph.D. student at UCLA, told The Intercept. “Even since the encampment, they’ve been more and more present and bringing in other departments.”

In the face of this repression, said Corey Saylor, the research and advocacy director at Council on American-Islamic Relations, “This generation of college students is extraordinarily brave and principled. They’ve been willing to sacrifice education and career to stand on a very simple human value that genocide is wrong, that occupation is wrong, that apartheid is wrong.”

The pro-Palestine encampments presented university leaders with a publicity crisis, forcing them to choose between options ranging from letting the peaceful protests play out to quashing them with the full force of the police. Universities almost exclusively chose the latter. With encouragement from the state government, California public universities responded to the student protests less like dissent and more like a natural disaster.

Research support provided by the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations.

The post How California Spent Natural Disaster Funds to Quell Student Protests for Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

That headline, as well as statements from Barnard College and the NYPD, overlooked a key fact: The Palestine solidarity protesters were actually the targets of the bomb threat.

This revelation has alarmed faculty and students, who are now being interrogated by school officials about the threat during inquiries over alleged student code of conduct violations. Faculty and attorneys working with the protesters are also concerned that information from those interrogations could be shared with the government, as Barnard faces pressure to hand over information about students to Congress — where Republicans have repeatedly painted student protesters as terrorists — as part of its investigation into antisemitism on college campuses.

When asked by The Intercept whether the school had made public that the bomb threat targeted pro-Palestine students, a Barnard spokesperson pointed to a tweet from the NYPD.

“The NYPD is responding to a bomb threat at the Milstein Center at Barnard College and is evacuating the building. Anyone who refuses to leave the location is subject to arrest. Please stay away from the area,” the post on X states.

Barnard, which is Columbia University’s affiliated women’s college, did not respond to detailed questions about the timeline of when it called police onto campus, why students were being asked about the threat, what information it planned to share with Congress, or why it had not made public that protesters were the target of the threat.

“The fact that these students were targets does not seem to have been made clear,” said Homa Zarghamee, an economics professor at Barnard.

Zarghamee noted she has not seen the kind of support for students who were the target of a threat of violence that she would have expected from the administration “in this era of safety concerns.” 

“What we have never heard from the administration — this time, or truthfully any time in the past — is anything about the fact that this was a threat made to our students, who we need to remember, again and again, are being disciplined for peaceful protest against the Israeli war on Gaza,” said Thea Abu El-Haj, a professor of education at Barnard.

Though the school itself never explicitly blamed the bomb threat on students, Abu El-Haj said everyone she has spoken with outside of Barnard had assumed that the protesters were responsible. 

“The language from the administration seems to consistently be about the protesters as threatening. And it seems very much addressed to a broader public audience,” she said. “I can say for myself, but also for the students I teach, they are really upset that no one is expressing concern for them and for the threats that have been brought against them.” 

According to a screenshot of the bomb threat obtained by The Intercept, the sender emailed school administrators at 4:01 p.m. on March 5 saying they had placed a bomb “in the Barnard College library.” The sender, who used the email address, pardonderek@mail2tor.com, wrote that they intended to attack the “anti-white faggot terrorists/communists that are protesting.” 

In an email sent that evening to the coalition of protesters Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Barnard President Laura Ann Rosenbury said students, faculty, and staff had been ordered to clear the building so the NYPD and its bomb squad could assess the threat. She added that the school had asked police not to arrest protesters. An NYPD spokesperson told The Intercept that it dispatched its Emergency Services and K-9 units. The spokesperson did not respond to a question clarifying whether the NYPD Bomb Squad, a separate unit, had also been dispatched. 

Later that night, the college addressed the bomb threat in an email to the broader school community. Rosenbury said the bomb threat was no longer a danger and went on to describe the “disturbing and unacceptable events” that took place in Milstein prior to the threat. She said staff tried to get protesters to leave the building throughout the afternoon and that the “unauthorized protest” had disrupted classes and studies. She blamed protesters for putting the entire school community at risk by not following evacuation orders after the threat was received.

“Our staff, at risk to their own personal safety, remained in the Milstein lobby, urging the masked disruptors to take the threat seriously,” Rosebury wrote. “Even when the College activated the fire alarm, the masked protesters put our entire campus at risk by refusing to leave.” 

At the time of the incident, school administrators and the New York Police Department gave no indication that the threat had been made against pro-Palestine protesters. That information was not shared by school administrators or police with the broader school community or the public. 

“We heard news of a bomb threat and the lobby was evacuated very quickly thereafter but I do not recall being told the bomb threat was made toward those in the sit-in,” said Barnard theatre professor Shayoni Mitra.

Various reports have introduced differing timelines of police response — and different reasons the NYPD was called to the scene.

The day after the protest, an NYPD spokesperson told the Columbia Spectator that police had responded to the protest around 1:50 p.m. to an “unscheduled demonstration,” and said it had no information about a bomb threat.

Three days later, another NYPD spokesperson told the Spectator something else: that police had indeed responded to the protest because of the bomb threat. The spokesperson also said that students who were arrested on charges including governmental obstruction and trespass were taken into custody during the police evacuation in response to the threat. Barnard told the Spectator that it called police in response to the threat, not because the demonstration was unauthorized. 

Mitra said she taught a class on the first floor of the building that houses the library on the day of the sit-in and heard three shelter-in-place orders announced over the public address system between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. A photo shared with The Intercept shows a handful of police officers standing on the street outside Milstein at 3:25 p.m. — 36 minutes before the bomb threat email reviewed by The Intercept arrived in the school president’s inbox.

A later message from Rosenbury mentioned threats “via multiple email messages on March 5, 2025” — further muddying the timeline as to when police were first called to campus and why.

“Barnard lied when it said it called the police because of the bomb threat — timestamps show the threat came after the call,” said attorney Remy Green, partner at the law firm Cohen&Green and counsel for several students at Barnard. “Rather than address and protect its students from a violent, racist, misogynistic, and homophobic person who threatened to murder them, Barnard saw an opportunity to deceive the public into thinking the students were connected to the threat. By doing this, Barnard has made this campus less safe and less free.” 

According to three people who were in the library when police arrived, dozens of NYPD officers from the Strategic Response Group — a specialized team often deployed to protests — entered the library shortly after 4 p.m. An NYPD spokesperson later told the Columbia Spectator that police responded at 4:22 p.m.

The NYPD did not respond to The Intercept’s questions asking the department to clarify what time police first responded on campus that day. 

Sources who spoke to The Intercept said that the NYPD kettled some protesters on the lawn outside the building. Photos reviewed by The Intercept show students who were arrested in zip-ties lined up against the outer wall of the building. Police then escorted the people they arrested through the building that was the target of an active bomb threat. 

“They took the students that they had arrested and put them up first up against the building that was ostensibly about to explode,” said Abu El-Haj after reviewing footage and photos taken by students.

Some members of the faculty learned that the threat was directed at student protesters the next day at a faculty meeting. According to sources with knowledge of the meeting, faculty members read aloud the text of the bomb threat to colleagues, shared with a few professors internally by an administrator.

In a joint statement released following the meeting, Barnard and Columbia faculty condemned the arrests of students and blamed them on Rosenbury, as the school had summoned police to campus. They called for an independent investigation into the incident and the school’s response to another sit-in at Barnard’s Milbank Hall on February 26. 

Students themselves are now being interrogated about the threat. Barnard’s head of public safety — ex-NYPD officer Gary Maroni — is questioning student protesters about that threat in mandatory fact-finding meetings, according to emails reviewed by The Intercept and accounts from faculty and attorneys working with pro-Palestine students on campus. Faculty worry that these interrogations — which students were originally told they had to attend without any witnesses or legal representation — could be turned over to Congress. 

“I have deep concerns about students walking into those meetings without lawyers because of the way that Barnard is in the midst of a discovery process with Congress, as I understand it,” said Abu El-Haj. “I am worried about either congressional subpoenas, or if there’s any attempt on the part of the criminal justice system to bring any kind of criminal cases against students, that those records might be subpoenable.”

Barnard is one of several schools that put in place new disciplinary processes and campus speech policies as part of efforts to curb speech on campus since the height of Gaza protest encampments. 

In an email to faculty last month, Rosenbury outlined some of those changes, including new rules governing the “time, place, and manner” of events and demonstrations. She said the school would make “every effort” to deescalate disruptions internally. But if they persisted and prevented members of the school community from learning, studying, or working, administrators would “continue to rely on the NYPD when specialized skills are required, as was the case when the College received bomb threats.” 

Rosenbury wrote in the email that the school had paused disciplinary actions related to activities that occurred after February 26 while enacting new disciplinary policies in response to the war on Gaza. (All student conduct processes for incidents prior to February 26, the date of another campus demonstration, had been completed by late March.) Rosenbury said, however, that fact-finding related to disciplinary investigations would continue. Part of the process, she wrote, could be an “inquiry meeting” that would not include witnesses or legal representation. Faculty managed to push back on this stipulation and attended some of the meetings. If charges were recommended after inquiry, Rosenbury wrote, she would consult with administrators about whether the school was close enough to adopting its new policies to hear new cases. 

At least 27 students have been called into such inquiry meetings for protests last month. One student was called into a conduct meeting for two actions: a Jews Say No to ICE protest last month, and another action earlier this month. They are being charged with disruptive behavior, failure to comply, failure to maintain public order, and obstruction of access. 

It’s not clear what if any information from the inquiry meetings the school plans to share with congressional officials. Either way, protesters must reckon with potentially life-altering charges from the school, said Abu El-Haj. 

“Outside of the context of whether this gets subpoenaed anywhere or goes to Congress, students are facing quite serious consequences,” she said. “Expulsion and or suspension can carry significant financial consequences for students.” 

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Barnard College was dropped last month from the lawsuit over the government’s efforts to access disciplinary records for student protesters, including those of recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order last month blocking Columbia and Barnard from turning over information to Congress; Barnard is not currently subject to the order after being dropped from the suit. Earlier this month, the judge ruled that Columbia must give Khalil and other students 30 days notice before turning over additional information to Congress.

At least 50 faculty members sent a letter to Barnard administrators on Thursday asking for an update on the new deadline and what information the school plans to share with Congress. Faculty who spoke to The Intercept said they have not yet received answers from the school. In a meeting on April 7, Rosenbury told faculty that the school had received an extension on its deadline to turn over information to Congress but did not specify the new deadline.

The Trump administration has used the president’s executive order on antisemitism to attack, abduct, and deport student protesters that Trump and his Republican colleagues have repeatedly, with no evidence, conflated with terrorists.

Correction: April 24, 2025, 9:40 p.m. ET
Due to an editing error, this story has been corrected to reflect that Gary Maroni is the head of public safety at Barnard College, not Columbia University. And Barnard President Laura Ann Rosenbury told faculty about a moved deadline for turning over information to Congress was April 7, not April 11.

The post A Bomb Threat Targeted Student Protesters. So Why Did They Get Blamed for It? appeared first on The Intercept.

As the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt has done little to uphold his organization’s claims to fight antisemitism as the “leading anti-hate organization in the world.” Instead, he’s shored up the ADL’s role as little more than a fierce pro-Israel lobby group known for defending Israel by attacking its critics. With no sense of irony, much of this effort manifests as defamatory speech — at least in the everyday, if not the legal, sense — by Greenblatt.

This weekend on Fox News, however, Greenblatt outdid himself. 

In his appearance, Greenblatt said college graduates and social media influencers who have spoken out against Israel’s genocide were responsible for a man in Boulder, Colorado, throwing Molotov cocktails at a group of elderly people calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. 

Greenblatt singled out a speech by the graduating class president from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while naming streamer Hasan Piker and social media influencer Guy Christensen as “promoters of hate.”

“These speakers at these graduations — it just happened the other day at MIT — spreading blood libels about the Jewish people or the Jewish state, it creates conditions in which this kind of act is happening with increasing frequency,” Greenblatt said, referring to both the attack in Boulder and the shooting of two Israeli embassy officials in Washington, D.C., last month. 

Megha Vemuri, the MIT class president that Greenblatt referenced, did not mention “the Jewish people” at all and spread no “blood libels” — antisemitic false accusations that Jewish people are murderous. She is one of several graduating students around the country who have used their commencement speeches to decry Israel’s U.S.-backed onslaught, which had already razed every university in Gaza to rubble by January of last year. 

While Greenblatt’s claims on Fox were false and harmful, strong free-speech protections under the First Amendment mean that it is unlikely a defamation lawsuit against him would succeed in this country. But there is little doubt that, in the everyday sense of the term “defamation,” the Anti-Defamation League CEO’s claims that commencement speakers were spreading antisemitic lies — and suggestion that they’re responsible for two stochastic, violent attacks — were defamatory and dangerously so. 

“We’ve got to stop it once and for all,” Greenblatt said of speeches like Vemuri’s. “I hope the Trump administration will do just that.”

In her fact-based and morally informed criticism of a nation state under investigation for genocide, Vemuri praised her classmates for protesting for their school’s divestment from “the genocidal Israeli military.” 

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“As scientists, engineers, academics and leaders, we have a commitment to support life, support aid efforts and call for an arms embargo and keep demanding now as alumni, that MIT cuts the ties,” Vemuri said.  “We are watching Israel try to wipe out Palestine off the face of the earth, and it is a shame that MIT is a part of it.”

In both the Colorado and D.C. attacks, which had otherwise nothing obvious in common, the suspects shouted “Free Palestine!” and reportedly told police that their actions were in response to Israel’s assault on Gaza. Without knowing these very different individuals’ media consumption habits, I doubt they were spurred to action by graduation speeches.

Every day, new footage of mutilated children’s bodies, desperate hospital workers, and scenes of searing grief are broadcast directly from Gaza to our phones. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regularly releases public statements about ensuring that Gaza is ethnically cleansed. His government’s eliminationist violence in Gaza has been so extreme, unrelenting, and, crucially, livestreamed that even many complicit leaders in the West have in recent weeks condemned Israel’s excesses. Their belated words are no doubt gestures to future-proof their own reputations against charges of enabling genocide, but they nonetheless speak to the undeniability of the horror. 

So blinkered is Greenblatt’s view, though, that it is only criticism of brutal Israeli acts, not the acts themselves, that could promote a violent response from observers abroad.

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The logical conclusion of Greenblatt’s claim is that anything but silence on or support for Israel’s actions is not only antisemitic, but also produces the conditions for violence against Jewish people in the United States. Through Greenblatt, the ADL has backed the McCarthyite repression of campus protests and pro-Palestinian campus speech, praising overreaching crackdowns by university administrators and the government.  

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is continuing its campaign to cage and deport students and graduates who express criticism of the Israeli regime. Though Greenblatt marginally backtracked and called for more “transparency,” the ADL’s first reaction to Mahmoud Khalil’s kidnapping by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for his constitutionally protected speech was one of support: “We appreciate the Trump Administration’s broad, bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism.”

MIT banned Vermuri from walking in her graduation ceremony in retaliation for her speech. New York University withheld the diploma of commencement speaker Logan Rozos, who used his speech to “condemn this genocide and complicity in this genocide.” These were just the latest examples of universities responding to pro-Palestine speech with punishment.

What further extremist censorship could Greenblatt desire? 

“Blood libel” has become a standard retort of Israeli officials and their mouthpieces when critics draw attention to the Israeli military’s killing or maiming of over 50,000 children in Gaza. While hardly alone in this, Greenblatt has been a consistent public voice enforcing the pernicious lie that anti-Zionism is antisemitic, and that the movement to stop the mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians — a movement in which thousands of Jewish people like myself participate — is a movement against Jewish safety. 

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Long before last year’s Gaza solidarity encampments, the ADL’s reporting on antisemitic incidents played a significant role in obfuscating understanding about the state of antisemitism in the U.S. When the ADL counts antisemitic incidents, it includes actions done in protest of Israel, which in turn downplays the threat of far-right antisemitic violence; notably, Greenblatt excused white nationalist billionaire Elon Musk’s apparent Nazi salute at a Trump inauguration rally as an “awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm,” while Greenblatt has compared the Palestinian keffiyeh scarf to a Nazi swastika. A number of the organization’s own staff quit in the months following October 7, when Greenblatt doubled down on targeting Israel’s critics. 

The continued insistence that Israel’s brutality is carried out in the interest of all Jewish people absolutely puts Jewish people at risk all around the world through the forceful conflation of Jewish identity and an ethnostate carrying out genocide — an alignment that thousands of anti-Zionist Jews like myself reject. It is ideologues like Greenblatt, not the anti-genocide student activists he targets, who insist on connecting Jewish identity with Israeli state violence.

While the ADL is ostensibly committed to tracking all forms of extremist violence, Greenblatt has not blamed pro-Israel voices in the U.S. for the rise in Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian attacks in the last two years. We did not hear equivalent calls for the government to “deal” with Zionist advocates when three Palestinian students wearing keffiyeh were shot in Vermont in late 2023, leaving one paralyzed; or when a pro-Israel landlord in Illinois killed a six-year-old Palestinian-American tenant by stabbing him 26 times with a large military knife; or when a Texas woman attempted to drown a Palestinian-American three year old last September in an act police said was motivated by racial hatred. Greenblatt — and the U.S. government under both Biden and Trump — reserve their accusations of collective culpability for Palestinians and their supporters. 

In a New York Times Morning newsletter on Tuesday, which itself mangled distinctions between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, author Jonathan Weisman wrote, “Attacks on Jews for the actions of an Israeli government a world away are collective punishment, and collective punishment is bigotry.” On this point, Weisman is entirely correct. It’s nonetheless an extraordinary statement to make without stressing that Israel’s all-out destruction of Gaza in response to October 7 is “collective punishment” at its most extreme. 

Meanwhile, Greenblatt is inviting this country’s authoritarian government to carry out further collective punishment against Israel’s critics.

The post MIT Student Condemned Genocide — So ADL Chief Said She Helped Cause Boulder Attack appeared first on The Intercept.

“Columbia retains control over its academic and operational decisions,” Shipman wrote in a July 24 email to the entire university community.

In an interview with the campus newspaper, she said the topic of disciplinary action had not even come up in negotiations with the Trump administration.

The claim struck critics of the university’s recent actions as odd on its face. The school had agreed to pay a $200 million fine and make significant changes to its academic operations, disciplinary proceedings, and oversight — including giving the Trump administration access to vast swaths of previously private university documents and data.

Critics of the deal with the Trump administration also noted that Shipman’s claim — that disciplinary action wasn’t discussed — was far-fetched. The announcement of the deal came on the heels of the suspensions and expulsions of almost 80 students who had participated in a sit-in and protest in Butler Library on May 7 — in a newly formulated disciplinary process that hewed closely to government demands.

A review by The Intercept of correspondence between the Trump administration and Columbia, the conditions and clauses of their final agreement, dozens of university records, and details of disciplinary proceedings related to pro-Palestine protests point to a different story.

What Independence?

Not only did Columbia and the Trump administration have detailed exchanges about altering the university’s disciplinary proceedings — especially in how they impacted protesters — but new rules regarding disciplinary procedures were also imposed on the university by its powerful board of trustees in a manner explicitly outlined by the Trump administration.  

Though Shipman said Columbia’s academic independence was the school’s “north star” during the negotiations, the private research university has made several concessions on academic functioning in its agreement with the federal government. And Shipman said that Columbia retains control over its operational decisions, yet the deal with the Trump administration includes clauses such as one in which the university has agreed to “examine its business model and take steps to decrease financial dependence on international student enrollment.”

In a statement received after publication of this article, a university spokesperson pointed to a clause in the agreement with the government stating that the school is to remain independent.

“No provision of this Agreement, individually or taken together, shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, University hiring, admission decisions, or the content of academic speech,” the agreement says.

A key element of the agreement was the appointment of a third-party “Resolution Monitor” to oversee compliance. 

“We really preferred that it be an independent monitor as somebody we know and have vetted and who is nonpolitical, and so that we have a regular path to showing we’re in compliance with the agreement,” Shipman told Columbia’s campus newspaper.

The man selected for the role, Bart Schwartz, is the co-founder of Guidepost Solutions, which sponsored an event in June 2025 “helping Israel heal and rebuild.” He was selected in a joint decision by the university and government officials.

On top of it all, the school paid a massive $200 million fine — roughly half of the federal grants that had been frozen, which the university was seeking to recoup in the negotiations.

“It seems,” Joseph Slaughter, an English and comparative literature professor and the director of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia, told The Intercept, “they paid off an extortionist and they hope that the extortionists won’t come back.”

Retrofitting Disciplinary Process

As the protests and crackdown continued, changes in disciplinary procedures at the university came in lockstep with Trump administration demands. In some cases, they were done quietly in response to developments at the university.

As students swarmed a study room at Butler Library in May, the school’s website listed one set of disciplinary procedures. The students that had charges leveled against them by the school understood they would face disciplinary hearings according to the available system. By the time their processes got rolling, however, the rules had changed.

In July, weeks after the disciplinary changes were brought, the university webpage listing the rules was quietly updated. The new webpage, however, did say the new policies had been ratified by Columbia’s board of trustees on May 7 — the same day as the Butler Library protest. The revisions to the rules tracked almost exactly with what the Trump administration had demanded of the school.

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The new disciplinary procedures were used to execute mass sanctions on nearly 80 pro-Palestine protesters. On July 21, the disciplined students were variously issued expulsions, one- to three-year suspensions, or degree revocations. The sanctions were delivered just two days before Columbia’s agreement with the Trump administration was signed and announced.

“It’s an unusual tactic in normal times to implement the terms of a settlement voluntarily before the full agreement is reached,” Katherine Franke, a retired professor at Columbia Law School, told The Intercept. “But these are not normal times, and Columbia has shown itself more than willing to bend a knee to the Trump administration in the hopes that doing so will make things less bad.”

Negotiated With Trump

When asked by the campus newspaper if the topic of disciplinary action ever came up in negotiations with the Trump administration, Shipman said simply: “It did not.” She emphasized the independence of the University Judicial Board, or UJB, the body that adjudicates internal disciplinary matters. A review of the correspondence between the Trump administration and Columbia by The Intercept, as well as the details of their final agreement, paints a more complicated picture.

The Columbia spokesperson emphasized that Shipman was not talking about the UJB in her interview with the Spectator, the campus newspaper.

“The question from the Spectator referenced in your article referred to whether the government had asked for specific disciplinary outcomes, which they did not,” the spokesperson said. “To confirm, the disciplinary determinations issued on July 21 by the University Judicial Board (UJB) are completely unrelated to the resolution with the government.”

In its demand letter to Columbia on March 13, the Trump administration expressed dissatisfaction with the UJB and called for it to be abolished. Instead, the government said, all disciplinary processes should be centralized under the office of the university president. Eight days later, Columbia announced that it was moving the functioning of the UJB entirely under “the Office of the Provost, who reports to the President of Columbia.”

It was a marked departure from the existing process. In the past, UJB members reflected the community makeup and were appointed by the University Senate, a democratically elected body comprising members of the faculty, students, and staff. Now, students would no longer serve on the UJB; the five-member disciplinary panels would be restricted to faculty and staff. Student organizers said that this move would disallow students to be adjudicated on by a panel that included their peers — “a due process right parallel to a jury panel of one’s peers.”

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The school justified the changes as a way to bolster “effectiveness and impartiality” of disciplinary proceedings, but no reasoning was provided as to why the existing process of appointing members through the senate had been deemed insufficient or in need of remedy.

A Columbia website page says the ongoing process of updating the university’s statutes to include the new policies is still “underway” — raising questions for critics of the changes as to why the Butler protesters had been processed under the new rules.

“The UJB hearings as they were conducted for the Butler protests don’t abide by the university statutes and that seems to create all sorts of legal liabilities,” said Slaughter, who is a member of the university’s Rules of University Conduct Committee.

The rejiggering of disciplinary progresses gave the administration the ability to crack down on protesters in a way that met the Trump administration’s demands, Victoria Frye, a professor at Columbia who was at the library during the Butler protest, told The Intercept.

“The UJB was restructured without Senate input,” she wrote in a statement, “to remove student representatives and ensure that student punishment was meted out severely and swiftly in order to placate the federal administration.”

Unprecedented Consequences for Protesters

The penalties handed out to students were severe.

A month after the library protest, on June 9, as the disciplinary procedures got under way, protesters received an email from the university rules administrator listing recommended sanctions that ranged from suspensions to expulsion. Protesters had not yet had the chance to argue their cases before the judicial board, but it seemed their penalties had already been decided.

A second-year undergraduate student, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the school, received a two-year recommended sanction.

“The idea of giving us recommended sanctions — it’s really prejudicial,” said the student, who had no prior violations. “Like, they’ve decided that this is what they want to give us, something that is completely not based on precedent, with a board that is changing, with a process that they’re ignoring. It is ridiculous that they would ever expect that we would believe that this was fair.”

Slaughter, the Rules of University Conduct Committee member, said, “Those notices of suggested punishments of two- and three-year suspensions sounded to me like Alice in Wonderland: the sentence first, verdict afterwards.”

On July 21, most students involved in the Butler protest received notice of their official sanctions. Almost 80 students were issued suspensions, expulsions, or degree revocations.

They weren’t the only ones to get the results of their disciplinary proceedings. On the same day, students who had been involved in a late May 2024 Gaza solidarity encampment during the school’s alumni weekend also received their decisions. Several students who were investigated for that encampment told The Intercept that they were found to not have violated any rules. A university announcement on the disciplinary outcomes of the two protests gave details of the outcomes in the Butler cases, but not the alumni weekend encampment.

“The entire process is just a charade to give the veneer of due process, but it’s just whatever is politically expedient,” said one student investigated for his role in the encampment, who asked for anonymity to avoid retaliation from the school. The student, who was found to not have violated any rules, said it appeared the school had pursued harsher punishments in cases that garnered more media. The student said administrators had seemingly asked themselves, “Who are we going to offer up as sacrificial lambs? What is going to be expedient for us?”

Butler sanctions, meanwhile, were more severe. Grant Miner, the president of Columbia’s student workers union, said that past disruptions to student activity had faced, in comparison, lesser consequences — and more rounds of warnings. There were warnings, for instance, given over a marching band tradition of playing in Butler Library. In the case of a 2016 sit-in at Low Library to demand the university’s divestment from fossil fuels, participants were able to clear their charges by writing letters of apology to maintenance and administrative staff. Miner said the Butler Gaza protest was treated differently.

“This is completely not in keeping with past precedent, which is one of the core tenets of the disciplinary process — that they have to be in tune with past punishments, to prevent them from being arbitrary or draconian,” he said. Miner, a Jewish pro-Palestine protester, faced disciplinary action himself for participation in the occupation of Hamilton Hall in 2024; he was expelled by Columbia in March, on the same day that the Trump administration sent its letter of demands to the university.

To return to the university after their suspension terms are complete, students are required to comply with several conditions — including submitting a letter of “reflection” and contrition.

Miner said, “You’re essentially making these people apologize for supporting Palestinians. Somebody protests for Palestine and your condition for letting them back on campus is that they disavow the very thing that they protested against.”

One graduate student who participated in the Butler Library protest and was suspended does not intend to write the apology letter.

“I don’t regret what I did. I personally will not be apologizing for it,” they said. “The campus politics and my own education and my own employment are not even remotely as important as a single life in Gaza that Israel is murdering right now.”

Both suspended students who spoke with The Intercept face additional disciplinary procedures under the university’s Office of Institutional Equity, a separate department that pursues cases of alleged discrimination and harassment. The process has been used to accuse pro-Palestine demonstrators at Columbia of anti-Jewish bias.

A Columbia Refashioned by Trump

The agreement puts Columbia in line with Trump administration demands that went well beyond campus fights over Israel’s assault on Gaza.

In its agreement, Columbia promises to “not provide benefits or advantages to individuals on the basis of protected characteristics” — in line with Trump’s campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. The agreement continues, “Columbia shall not maintain programs that promote unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes, quotas, diversity targets, or similar efforts.”

Echoing the Trump administration’s anti-transgender policies, the agreement stipulates that Columbia will provide “single-sex housing for women who request such housing and all-female sports, locker rooms, and showering facilities.”

The university’s concessions, critics of the agreement said, started well before the agreement was announced — suggesting that the deal itself would only be the latest, not a final, step in the process.

“It would be a mistake to look at the document that was released and think this is the extent of the deal,” Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics at Columbia, told The Intercept.

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Howley pointed to the mass sanctions for the Butler protest, as well as an announcement by Columbia on July 15, one week before the deal with the Trump administration was signed, that the university was entering a training partnership with the Anti-Defamation League, a right-wing pro-Israel group that routinely conflates pro-Palestine activism with antisemitism.

“Columbia has been making concessions for weeks and months on things that we know the federal government was asking for, like seizing control of the UJB and adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism,” Howley said. “The fact that we can see that they gave things up as preconditions to getting a deal in the first place tells us that the full extent of concessions and extractions is not articulated simply in the language of that document.”

Trump’s campaign, critics of Columbia said, didn’t begin with the Gaza war and won’t end with Columbia.

“It is merely the start of the next phase of the administration’s campaign to use Columbia as an example for other universities,” said Franke, the retired Columbia law professor. “They won’t let up, and the ‘agreement’ gives them all the power to keep weaponizing the specter of antisemitism to dismantle a world-class university.”

Update: August 8, 2025
This story has been updated to include information and remarks provided by Columbia after publication.

The post How Columbia’s Leadership Refashioned the University in Trump’s Image 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.

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.

What the students didn’t know at the time was that the University of Houston had contracted with Dataminr, an artificial intelligence company with a troubling record on constitutional rights, to gather open-source intelligence on the student-led movement for Palestine. Using an AI tool known as “First Alert,” Dataminr was scraping students’ social media activity and chat logs and sending what it learned to university administration.

This is the first detailed reporting on how a U.S. university used the AI technology to surveil its own students. It’s just one example of how public universities worked with private partners to surveil student protests, revealing how corporate involvement in higher education can be leveraged against students’ free expression.

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This is the final installment in an investigative series on the draconian surveillance practices that universities across the country employed to crack down on the 2024 pro-Palestine encampments and student protests. More than 20,000 pages of documentation covering communications from April and May 2024, which The Intercept obtained via public records requests, reveal a systematic pattern of surveillance by U.S. universities in response to their students’ dissent. Public universities in California tapped emergency response funds for natural disasters to quell protests; in Ohio and South Carolina, schools received briefings from intelligence-sharing fusion centers; and at the University of Connecticut, student participation in a protest sent administrators into a frenzy over what a local military weapons manufacturer would think.

The series traces how universities, as self-proclaimed safe havens of free speech, exacerbated the preexisting power imbalance between institutions with billion-dollar endowments and a nonviolent student movement by cracking down on the latter. It offers a preview of the crackdown to come under the Trump administration as the president re-entered office and demanded concessions from U.S. universities in an attempt to limit pro-Palestine dissent on college campuses.

“Universities have a duty of care for their students and the local community,” Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept. “Surveillance systems are a direct affront to that duty for both. It creates an unsafe environment, chills speech, and destroys trust between students, faculty, and the administration.”

At the University of Houston, the encampment was treated as an unsafe environment. University communications officials using Dataminr forwarded the alerts — which consist of an incident location and an excerpt of the scraped text — directly to the campus police. One alert sent by Dataminr to a University of Houston communications official identified a potential pro-Palestine incident based on chat logs it scraped from a semi-private Telegram channel called “Ghosts of Palestine.”

“University of Houston students rise up for Gaza, demanding an end to Genocide,” the chat stated. First Alert flagged it as an incident of concern and forwarded the information to university officials.

According to Dataminr’s marketing materials, First Alert is designed for use by first responders, sending incident reports to help law enforcement officials gather situational awareness. But instead of relying on officers to collect the intelligence themselves, First Alert relies on Dataminr’s advanced algorithm to gather massive amounts of data and make decisions. In short, Dataminr’s powerful algorithm gathers intelligence, selects what it views to be important, and then forwards it to the paying client.

A follow-up public records request sent to the University of Houston returned records of more than 900 First Alert emails in the inbox of a university administrator, only in April 2024.

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The AI company has been implicated in a number of scandals, including the domestic surveillance of Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 and abortion rights protesters in 2023. The Intercept reported in April that the Los Angeles Police Department used First Alert to monitor pro-Palestine demonstrations in LA. First Alert is one, but not the only, service that Dataminr offers. For newsrooms to corporate giants, Dataminr’s powerful algorithms power intelligence gathering and threat response for those willing to pay.

“It’s concerning enough when you see evidence of university officials scrolling through individual student social media, that’s going to chill people’s speech,” said Nathan Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “But it’s a whole other level of concern when you start contracting with these companies that are using some kind of algorithm to analyze, at scale, people’s speech online.”

The University of Houston and Dataminr did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

While the University of Houston leaned on Dataminr to gather intelligence on the student-led movement for Palestine, it is just one example of the open-source intelligence practices used by universities in the spring of 2024. From screenshots of students’ Instagram posts to the use of on-campus surveillance cameras, the documents obtained by The Intercept illustrate how the broadening net of on-campus intelligence gathering swept up constitutionally protected speech in the name of “social listening.”

University communications officials were often left to do the heavy lifting of hunting down activists’ social media accounts to map out planned demonstrations. Posts by local Students for Justice in Palestine chapters of upcoming demonstrations were frequently captured by administrators and forwarded on. In other cases, university administrators relied on in-person intelligence gathering.

One set of communication in the documents suggests that at one point, University of Connecticut administrators were watching the students in the on-campus encampment sleep. “They are just beginning to wake up. It’s still very quiet. Just a couple of police cars nearby,” a UConn administrator wrote to other officials that April.

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U.S. universities, faced with the largest student protest movement in decades, used open-source intelligence to monitor the student-led movement for Palestine and to inform whether or not they would negotiate, and eventually, how they would clear the encampments. Emily Tucker, the executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, situated the development as part of the broader corporatization of U.S. higher education.

“ Institutions that are supposed to be for the public good are these corporate products that make them into vehicles for wealth extraction via data products,” Tucker told The Intercept. “Universities are becoming more like for-profit branding machines, and at the same time, digital capitalism is exploding.”

At UConn, the relationship between the corporate world and higher education led to a brief panic among university administrators. After protesters, including members of UConn’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and a campus group called Unchained, blocked access to a military aircraft manufacturing facility about 25 miles from campus, administrators went into a frenzy over what the military contractor would think.

“Ok. The P&W CEO is pretty upset with us about it right now and is pressing [University President] Radenka [Maric] for action,” wrote Nathan Fuerst to Kimberly Beardsley-Carr, both high-level UConn administrators. “Can you see if UConn PD can proactively reach out? If we can determine that no UConn Students were arrested, that would be immensely helpful.”

Fuerst was referring to a contractor for the Israeli military called Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of the $235 billion company formerly known as Raytheon — and a major UConn donor. Both UConn and Pratt & Whitney denied that the request occurred, pointing out that the military contractor has no CEO. Fuerst, Beardsley-Carr, and Maric did not respond to requests for comment.

Beardsley-Carr, in her own email sent four minutes after Fuerst’s, repeated the request: “As you can see below, the President is getting pressure from the CEO of Pratt and Whitney.”

Whether the company made the request or if it was, as UConn spokesperson Stephanie Reitz told The Intercept, “a misunderstanding,” it’s clear from the communications that UConn administrators were concerned about what the weapons manufacturer would think — and sprang to action, gathering information on students because of it.

Pratt & Whitney has donated millions of dollars to various university initiatives, and in April 2024, the same month as the protest, it was announced that a building on campus would be rededicated as the “Pratt & Whitney Engineering Building.” A partnership between the school and the company received an honorable mention from the governor’s office, prompting a Pratt & Whitney program engineer to write in an email: “It’s wonderful! P&W and UCONN have done some great things together.”

After a flurry of emails over the Pratt & Whitney arrests, on April 25, the UConn administrators’ concerns were lifted. “Middletown PD provided me with the names of the 10 individuals arrested during the below incident. None of the arrestees are current students,” UConn Police Lieutenant Douglas Lussier wrote to Beardsley-Carr.

“You have no idea how happy you just made me,” Beardsley-Carr wrote back.

It’s not just UConn, but U.S. higher education as a whole that has a deep and long-standing relationship with military weapons manufacturers. Whether it is endowed professorships, “Lockheed Martin Days,” defense industry presence at career fairs, or private donations, the defense industry has a hold on U.S. higher education, especially at elite universities, which serve as training grounds for high-paying and influential careers.

“These universities are the epicenter, the home base, of the future generation of Americans, future policy makers,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Al-Shabaka’s U.S. Policy Fellow. If universities “were so confident in Israel’s narrative and their narrative being the correct one,” Kenney-Shawa added, “they would let that debate in such important spaces play out.”

Some students who spoke with The Intercept emphasized that as a result of the surveillance they encountered during the protests, they have stepped up their digital security, using burner phones and limiting communication about potential demonstrations to secure messaging channels.

“ The campus is waiting and watching for these kinds of things,” said Kirk Wolff, a student at the University of Virginia who said he was threatened with expulsion for a one-man sit-in he staged on campus and expressed fear that university administrators would read his emails.

The surveillance had a “chilling effect,” in his experience, Wolff said. “ I had so many people tell me that they wanted to join me, that they agreed with me, and that they simply could not, because they were scared that the school would turn over their information.”

The University of Virginia did not respond to a request for comment on Wolff’s claims.

The surveillance detailed in this investigation took place under the Biden administration, before Trump returned to power and dragged the crackdown on pro-Palestine dissent into the open. Universities have since shared employee and student files with the Trump administration as it continues to investigate “anti-Semitic incidents on campus” — and use the findings as pretext to defund universities or even target students for illegal deportation.

Any open-source intelligence universities gathered could become fair game for federal law enforcement agencies as they work to punish those involved in the student-led movement for Palestine, Mir noted.

“A groundwork of surveillance has been built slowly on many college campuses for decades,” he said. “Now very plainly and publicly we have seen it weaponized against speech.”

Research support provided by the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations.

The post How Corporate Partnerships Powered University Surveillance of Palestine Protests appeared first on The Intercept.

The affidavit misstated basic facts and federal law, attorneys told The Intercept, but the judge nonetheless signed off and authorized ICE to search two students’ dorm rooms based on the assertion that Columbia might be “harboring” them in violation of federal law.

Pointing to decisions of the State Department to revoke one student’s visa and the other’s green card, ICE argued they were in the U.S. unlawfully. But neither ICE nor the State Department have the authority to determine whether someone is in the U.S. lawfully; they need an order from an immigration judge first. On top of that, ICE’s affidavit didn’t offer evidence that Columbia took any concrete steps to hide the students, only that university officials refused to let agents on campus to arrest them without judicial warrants.

“This affidavit is seriously problematic, and it’s extremely troubling that it would be offered to a federal court,” said David Leopold, an immigration attorney uninvolved in the case who reviewed the materials, in an emailed statement.

“The entire basis for the criminal warrant was wrong,” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council also uninvolved in the case, in a social media post.

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The affidavit was unsealed in federal court on Tuesday as part of a lawsuit by Columbia student Yunseo Chung, a lawful permanent resident whose green card the Trump administration is trying to revoke based on her arrest at a campus Gaza protest earlier this year. In a March 7 order, Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked an arcane legal provision he has used against other students with critical views of Israel, determining that Chung’s presence in the U.S. would “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Chung, 21, who is originally from South Korea and has lived in the U.S. since she was 7 years old, alleges she has been targeted in violation of her First Amendment and due process rights, and that ICE obtained the warrant to search her dorm room under “false pretenses.”

“The agent’s sworn statement confirms that, under the guise of investigating Columbia, ICE’s goal all along was to arrest Yunseo, a permanent resident whose only apparent offense was participating in a protest related to Palestinian human rights,” said Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York and co-director of CLEAR, a legal nonprofit and clinic that represents Chung. “Even the minor protest-related charges that ICE cites in its affidavit have since been dismissed.”

ICE and Columbia did not reply to The Intercept’s request for comment about the search warrants. 

A Judicial Fig Leaf

The unsealed materials confirm that the federal anti-harboring statute was the sole legal justification that ICE offered to support probable cause of a federal crime. The ICE agent alleged that Columbia was “concealing, harboring, or shielding from detection removable aliens.”

“Secretly and unconstitutionally, the government supposedly revoked Yunseo’s green card and then told a judge it needed to search her apartment for ‘fruits and instrumentalities’ of Columbia University’s alleged ‘harboring’ of her,” said Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, an attorney at Human Rights First who also represents Chung. “In other words, the government wanted a judicial fig leaf to enter Yunseo’s apartment and unconstitutionally arrest her.”

In his March 13 affidavit, George Ioannidis, an assistant special agent in charge of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations in New York, wrote that he expected the searches to yield evidence that Columbia had “harbored” Chung and another student, Ranjani Srinivasan, whose student visa the State Department had revoked a week earlier.

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But Srinivasan, originally from India, had already left the country by the time ICE sought a warrant to search her room, as the Department of Homeland Security blared in a triumphant press release and Ioannidis himself noted in his affidavit.

“Obviously, Columbia was not harboring someone who had left the country,” attorney Nathan Yaffe, who represents both Srinivasan and Chung, told The Intercept. “This is essentially saber-rattling by ICE, a warning shot meant to send a message to people who protest and members of their community.” 

More fundamentally, the anti-harboring statute requires that the “harbored” person must actually be in the country unlawfully and that the alleged “harborer” must take active steps to conceal that person from authorities.

ICE’s claim that revoking Srinivasan’s student visa made her presence in the country unlawful was “flat out false,” Leopold said. “Only an immigration judge can make that ruling if the person has been lawfully admitted to the U.S.”

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“Revoking a visa does NOT make someone immediately present without lawful status,” Reichlin-Melnick summarized. “That is absolutely false and ICE misrepresented this to the court.”

Similarly, until an immigration judge ordered otherwise, Chung was in the country entirely lawfully as a permanent resident. 

“The statute is clear that if a person has legal status in the US, it is impossible to harbor them. ICE’s affidavit confirms that Ms. Chung is a permanent resident — meaning she has legal status,” Yaffe said. “Thus by ICE’s own admission, there’s no good faith basis for ICE to have sought a harboring warrant related to Ms. Chung.”

“By definition,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote, “Columbia can’t have been ‘harboring’ them.”

Columbia’s Refusal to Comply

Ioannidis also did not provide facts to indicate Columbia had taken any active steps to conceal either student.

His affidavit recounts the Trump administration’s efforts to convince the university to allow ICE agents to come onto its property to arrest Chung and Srinivasan. By policy, Columbia only allows immigration agents into nonpublic areas of campus if they have a judicial warrant, which ICE did not yet have.

The government sent Columbia demands and administrative warrants regarding both students, but the university “refused, and continues to refuse, to permit immigration officers to locate and arrest” them, Ioannidis wrote in his affidavit.

Columbia’s refusal was the sole basis that Ioannidis offered, under penalty of perjury, as probable cause that its actions constituted “harboring.”

“Refusing to comply with an administrative warrant to conduct a search of one’s private property is not and cannot be a criminal offense,” wrote Columbia Law School professor Jamal Greene in a social media post about the search warrant materials.

Leopold explained, “Compliance with an administrative warrant is not mandatory. The law provides no consequences for failure to comply. Penalties may only be issued if a federal court orders compliance and the subject fails to comply.”

After the materials were unsealed, there was widespread concern at how Magistrate Judge Robert Lehrburger could have signed off on such a flimsy search warrant application.

Given the government’s “essentially unprecedented” basis revoking Chung’s green card, wrote Colangelo-Bryan, “One would think a court would have wanted to drill down on that more before signing off on the warrant.”

Chung first asked the district court judge overseeing her lawsuit to unseal the search warrant materials in early April. After Chung’s request went unanswered for weeks, The Intercept filed a letter emphasizing the public’s interest in the materials, which the New York Times also supported. On May 5, District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald ordered the government to begin the unsealing process.

“The affidavit in support of the warrant is yet another example of the administration making clear that it won’t let details like legality and facts stand in the way of its campaign of political repression,” Yaffe said. “As we continue to get more information through discovery about the administration’s misconduct here, we’re confident Ms. Chung’s legal claims will continue to be vindicated.”

Unlike others targeted for their ties to Gaza protests, Chung has not been detained despite ICE’s efforts, and Buchwald issued an order in March prohibiting the Trump administration from arresting her. Oral argument in her case is currently scheduled for May 29.

The post ICE Duped a Federal Judge Into Allowing Raid on Columbia Student Dorms appeared first on The Intercept.

The suspension lasted only one day before Columbia — with an apology from the university president’s office, Khalil later said — rescinded the suspension and dropped the disciplinary charges against him.

“After reviewing our records and reviewing evidence with Columbia University Public Safety, it has been determined to rescind your interim suspension,” wrote Claudia Andrade, an associate vice president with the school’s Center for Student Success and Intervention, in an email obtained by The Intercept. “Good luck on finals and hope you have a wonderful summer.”

Nearly a year later, the ongoing immigration case against Khalil, a green card holder who earned a master’s degree from Columbia in December, has become a national First Amendment battle with the Trump administration.

The arrest of and attempt to deport of Khalil hinged on casting his protest activity at Columbia as inimical to American interests. The Trump administration cited his role as a negotiator for student protesters as a reason for Khalil’s arrest.

According to documents obtained by The Intercept and a previous interview with Khalil, however, at the height of last year’s protests Khalil had faced disciplinary charges for a single day before being cleared of the allegation, having his interim suspension lifted, and receiving an apology from the school administration. The school, according to the documents, found no fault with Khalil that would merit disciplinary action.

An attorney representing Khalil said the charges and abrupt reversal were a common tactic used against student protesters.

“Emails like this one are one of the many types of psychologically damaging things Columbia does regularly to its students,” Amy Greer, Khalil’s attorney, told The Intercept. “It imposes interim measures and then retracts. It adds students to disciplinary cases and then dismisses.”

The Negotiator

Khalil’s brief suspension came as tensions over Columbia’s protests against Israel’s war on Gaza boiled over. Students at the school were at the forefront of a burgeoning movement to erect protest encampments on university grounds. And the Columbia administration was in talks with the students about their demands — particularly divestment from Israel — and how to clear the tent city from campus.

A graduate student active in the protest movement, Khalil served as a lead negotiator in talks over divestment from Israel. While others in the protest movement sometimes covered their faces to conceal their identity, Khalil frequently briefed journalists on the negotiation proceedings without a mask.

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On April 29, Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia who later resigned in August, announced that the negotiations had failed and the university would not divest from Israel.

That morning, the university handed protesters disciplinary warnings on Columbia letterhead saying that if they didn’t leave the encampment before 2 p.m., they would be suspended, preventing them from completing the spring 2024 semester.

According to Khalil, the university had provided written and oral confirmation that he would not be disciplined for his involvement in the encampments as a negotiator, but, the day after the negotiations’ failure and the building takeover, he was issued an interim suspension anyway following the demonstration. (A Columbia spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)

Khalil was accused of not leaving Columbia’s spring encampment despite earlier warnings. The school charged him with violations including “disruptive behavior,” activity relating to “tenting,” “failure to comply,” unauthorized “access and egress,” and “vandalism.”

A group of students acting on their own volition then moved to occupy Hamilton Hall, a central academic building later that night.

“You are restricted from all Columbia University campuses, facilities, and property, including but not limited to all academic and recreational spaces,” Khalil’s suspension notice read. “The current unauthorized encampment and disruption on Columbia University is creating an unwelcoming environment for members of our community.”

Similar interim suspension notices with identical language that were reviewed by The Intercept told alleged encampment participants that they could not participate in exams, submit assignments, or “engage in any activities affiliated with Columbia University” during the interim suspensions.

Given the reassurances from the administration, Khalil was “shocked” to receive the suspension notice, he told me in a May 2024 interview conducted for a separate story. The suspension, he thought, was meant “only to intimidate students regardless of their involvement.”

Greer, Khalil’s attorney, told The Intercept that it was possible Mahmoud’s suspension was just a miscommunication.

“It’s either the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing,” she said, “or they thought that they were somehow going to punish him for being a negotiator without anybody caring.”

Immigration Status

Suspensions can have particularly serious effects for international students. According to some immigration law experts, if a suspension prevents an international student from fulfilling a full course load or full-time status, the university may be required to report the student to the Department of Homeland Security within 21 days.

By barring Khalil from campus, his suspension could have qualified him for the DHS notification. At the time, Khalil said he was studying on an F-1 student visa.

The suspension, however, didn’t raise immediate alarms for Khalil about his immigration status.

“I did not worry about my immigration status, to be honest, at that point.”

“I did not worry about my immigration status, to be honest, at that point because there were higher stakes in terms of police coming into campus,” Khalil said in his May interview with me.

His right to be in the country, though, had been more generally hanging over his head.

Before the suspension came down, Khalil had already said he would avoid directly participating in protests because of his visa. The school’s “one-sided statements and inaction” on the Gaza war, he told reporters at a press conference as campus tensions mounted in late April, made him acutely aware of his precarious status in the country.

In May, in the aftermath of the crackdown and his suspension, Khalil told me, “I considered the encampment to be high risk given that the university has threatened to suspend and expel students, which might impact my status here in the States. Not only my immigration but also my university status, my scholarships.”

He added that, though he had earlier expressed reticence about participating, he had nonetheless been “in and out” of the encampment in his capacity as a negotiator.

At some point before his arrest, according to legal filings, he obtained a green card.

Charges Dropped

Things were moving fast on Columbia’s campus. The same evening that Khalil received his suspension notice, Columbia moved to clear the occupation of Hamilton Hall, along with the protest camp.

It would become a harbinger of a deepening crackdown on the nationwide student protest movement, with the university inviting New York City Police Department officers in riot gear onto campus. By midnight on April 30, 109 pro-Palestinian protesters had been arrested.

The next day, on May 1, Khalil received the notice that his disciplinary charges had been dropped. Khalil said in May that the school administration reached out to him unprompted.

“​​They called — the president’s office — to apologize, saying, ‘This shouldn’t have happened,’” Khalil said, recounting the interaction. “They dropped it on their own. Other students — they appealed and got it revoked. I did not have to do anything.”

“​​They called — the president’s office — to apologize, saying, ‘This shouldn’t have happened.’”

Though there were, Khalil said, no additional disciplinary actions against him pending, the rescinded suspension notice said the university reserved the right to add harassment charges or violations of the university’s nondiscrimination policies if he was found to have “contributed to the unwelcome and hostile environment.”

After Khalil’s disciplinary case was dropped by the Center for Student Success, he later came under scrutiny from a controversial new body formed by the university in August: the Office of Institutional Equity. In Khalil’s case and others, his attorney Greer said, the Office of Institutional Equity, has used spurious allegations of discrimination to target pro-Palestinian students making constitutionally protected speech.

Aside from the scrutiny from the Office of Institutional Equity, which Greer said was for protected speech related to social media posts, and the brief suspension, she knows of no other charges against Khalil.

ICE Target

In December, Khalil completed his studies for a master’s degree at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and planned to walk in graduation this May.

In March, though, ICE came for him. During the arrest, captured in a harrowing video taken by Khalil’s eight-months-pregnant wife, shows officers in plain clothes arresting, handcuffing, and whisking Khalil away — refusing to answer questions about their own identities, agency, and reasons for the arrest.

The arrest raised concerns among civil liberties advocates. The government, most prominently Secretary of State Marco Rubio, asserted without citing any evidence that Khalil is a supporter of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rules the Gaza Strip and fought the 18-month war with Israel.

Asked on CBS News if Khalil has any ties to terrorism, Rubio cited only protest activities on Columbia’s campus — referring several times to vandalization, a disciplinary charge that Khalil had specifically been cleared of, and his role as a negotiator for student protesters.

“This specific individual was the negotiator,” Rubio said. “Negotiating on behalf of people that took over a campus? That vandalized buildings? Negotiating over what? That’s a crime in and of itself, that they’re involved in being the negotiator, the spokesperson, this that the other.”

Rubio continued: “The bottom line is this: If you are in this country, to promote Hamas, to promote terrorist organizations, to participate in vandalism, to participate in acts of rebellion and riots on campus. We never would have let you in if we had known that and now that we know it, you’re going to leave.”

He cited no evidence tying Khalil to any acts of vandalism or other crimes, including any terrorism charges.

In a statement released Tuesday through attorneys, Khalil said he was a “political prisoner.”

“The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent,” he wrote. “Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”

Disciplinary Records

It is unclear whether the suspension charge was completely removed from Khalil’s disciplinary record. Those records have become the subject of a civil lawsuit filed last week by the Council on American-Islamic Relations against Columbia University administrators and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Khalil is the only named plaintiff in the lawsuit, which alleges the Republican-led House committee attempted to chill speech by commanding Columbia to produce student disciplinary records and other private information on multiple occasions.

The lawsuit says that the plaintiffs’ disciplinary records were handed over to Congress, though the scope of the records is unclear. On August 1, according to the lawsuit, the committee accused the university of not complying with their order to share “more detailed information on disciplinary actions relating to the encampment.”

“An immense number of student records were turned over, as well as faculty and staff,” Greer told The Intercept, adding that records belonging to individuals who may not have had active open cases or known that they were being investigated were also included. It is unclear whether any record of Khalil’s suspension was turned over to Congress.

“An immense number of student records were turned over, as well as faculty and staff.”

By fall, the committee published a 325-page report titled “Antisemitism on College Campuses Exposed,” which published redacted incident student records, including disciplinary documents, without university or student consent.

Greer said the information, though parts were redacted, could be used to identify students, including Khalil. The plaintiffs’ sensitive information appeared in the report and led to increased doxxing and safety threats, Greer said.

“The broad-based surveillance the university is undertaking with Mahmoud, but also hundreds of other students, makes us concerned about the breadth of materials that fall under the purview of these letters and subpoenas,” she said.

Last month, the committee demanded the university produce “all disciplinary records,” including “past disciplinary charges” of students implicated in 11 campus incidents after April 30.

Throughout the protests, Khalil had sought to keep things on campus in perspective. The day in April that negotiations failed, he compared the university’s distribution of printed suspension warnings to Israel’s dropping of leaflets on Gaza before an attack.

“The people of Gaza are under occupation, and here, we are under disciplinary charges,” Khalil told students under a threat of suspension. “That’s the difference.”

With disciplinary charges against him dropped, the threat of suspension against Khalil himself never fully materialized. He now finds himself nonetheless under attack from the highest echelons of the American government for his actions on campus.

The post Columbia Apologized to Mahmoud Khalil in May 2024 for One-Day Suspension appeared first on The Intercept.

But one student newspaper is fighting back. 

The Stanford Daily — the independent publication covering Stanford University — filed a First Amendment lawsuit suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem earlier this month over two tactics they’ve used in targeted deportation cases.

“What’s at stake in this case is whether, when you’re in the United States, you’re free to voice an opinion critical of the government without fear of retaliation,” said Conor Fitzpatrick, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, a civil liberties group representing the plaintiffs.

“It does not matter if you’re a citizen, here on a green card, or visiting Las Vegas for the weekend — you shouldn’t have to fear retaliation because the government doesn’t like what you have to say,” Fitzpatrick said.

Soon after Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by immigration agents in early March for his role in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, student journalists and editors around the country sensed a shift.

“That’s when we saw a significant uptick in calls,” said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, who manages the nonprofit’s hotline.

Over three decades helping student reporters navigate censorship and First Amendment issues, Hiestand had never fielded so many calls focused on potential immigration consequences for coverage on campus, both for the journalists and their named sources.

Öztürk’s arrest just a couple weeks later sent the legal hotline “into overdrive,” Hiestand told The Intercept. He heard from reporters, editors, and even political cartoonists worried their work about Israel, Palestine, and student protests might make them targets too.

In early April, the Student Press Law Center put out an unprecedented alert with other student journalism organizations, which advised campus publications to consider taking down or revising “certain stories that may now be targeted by immigration officials.”

“ICE has weaponized lawful speech and digital footprints and has forced us all to reconsider long-standing journalism norms,” reads the alert.

The next week, the Stanford Daily editors ran a letter about the chill its own staff was facing on campus.

“Both students and faculty have been increasingly hesitant to speak to The Daily and increasingly worried about comments that have already been made on the record,” their letter read. “Some reporters have been choosing to step away from stories in order to keep their name detached from topics that might draw unwanted attention. Even authors of dated opinion pieces have expressed fear that their words might retroactively put them in danger.”

Following the editors’ letter, FIRE approached the Stanford Daily’s editors to sue the Trump administration. It’s not the first time the publication has fought for freedom of the press in court. In 1978, a case brought by the Stanford Daily over a search warrant targeting its newsroom reached the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-3 that the warrant was valid and did not violate the First Amendment.

The student newspaper’s current suit — filed with two individual plaintiffs suing under the pseudonyms Jane Doe and John Doe — challenges two broad, arcane legal provisions that have become Rubio’s go-to tools against student activists and campus critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.

The first provision, which was added to the country’s immigration code in 1990, grants the secretary of state sweeping authority to render noncitizens deportable if they “compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.” The second law is even broader, allowing the secretary to revoke visas “at any time, in his discretion.”

There are relatively few cases in which either statute has been the grounds for deportation, particularly compared to the tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has rounded up and detained since Trump returned to the White House.  

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In fact, immigration scholars found that invoking the foreign policy provision as the sole grounds for deportation was “almost unprecedented,” according to a brief submitted in Khalil’s ongoing court battle by more than 150 lawyers and law professors. Based on government data, the scholars identified just 15 cases in which the foreign policy provision has ever been invoked, and just four in the past 25 years — most recently in 2018, during the first Trump administration.

“At a minimum, the government’s assertion of authority here is extraordinary — indeed, vanishingly rare,” the scholars wrote in their brief.

In Khalil’s case, the government identified only two others beside Khalil who had been targeted by Rubio under the “foreign policy” provision: although not identified by name, descriptions of the cases match Rubio’s orders against Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, and Badar Khan Suri, a scholar at Georgetown University. Oddly, the government failed to mention the case of Yunseo Chung, another Columbia undergraduate with a green card, whose deportation Rubio authorized in the very same letter as for Khalil.

The State Department greenlighted Öztürk’s detention, meanwhile, under the second, broader provision, court records show. The government has not made any similar accounting of how many times Rubio and his staff have invoked his “discretion” to revoke visas over alleged antisemitism. At one point Rubio claimed to have revoked as many as 300 visas, without specifying the authority under which he did so.

“The chill is the point,” Fitzpatrick, the FIRE attorney, said. “It doesn’t take deporting thousands of noncitizens to accomplish that chill,” since no one wants to become “the next Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk.”

In recent months, numerous courts have cast doubt on whether these two statutes can be used to target noncitizens based on their speech.

In Khalil’s case, which is currently pending in a federal appellate court, a district court judge in New Jersey ruled in June that the “foreign policy” provision is “very likely an unconstitutional statute.”

Similarly, in May a judge in Vermont ordered Öztürk’s release to “ameliorate the chilling effect that Ms. Ozturk’s arguably unconstitutional detention may have on non-citizens present in the country.” The government has also appealed that order, along with similar rulings that freed Mahdawi and Suri from detention, and another ruling that blocked the Trump administration from detaining Chung.

Now, the Stanford Daily is mounting a direct challenge to these two laws as deployed by the Trump administration. The student newspaper argues both provisions are unconstitutional under the First Amendment, at least when used to retaliate against protected speech.

“The Secretary of State and the President claim to possess unreviewable statutory authority to deport any lawfully present noncitizen for speech the government deems anti-American or anti-Israel. They are wrong,” reads their complaint, filed August 6. “The First Amendment cements America’s promise that the government may not subject a speaker to disfavored treatment because those in power do not like his or her message.”

Julia Rose Kraut, a legal historian who has written about the history of ideological deportation in the U.S., told The Intercept that Congress never meant for the foreign policy provision to be used “as a tool to suppress freedom of expression and association.”

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“Members of Congress intended for the foreign policy provision to be used in unusual circumstances, and only sparingly, carefully, and narrowly to exclude or deport specific individuals who would have a clear negative impact on United States foreign policy,” Kraut said, citing changes signed into law after the Cold War.

“What this case is seeking to establish is that political branches’ authority over immigration does not supersede the Bill of Rights,” FIRE’s Fitzpatrick said.

Briefing in the case is ongoing, and a hearing is scheduled for October 1.

“It’s gratifying to see a student newspaper upholding free speech at a time when many institutions are bending the knee,” said Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford, in an emailed statement. “Many students are afraid to protest the Trump administration’s actions not only because of the deportations, but because their own universities restricted speech and harshly disciplined protestors. I hope their courage inspires others to act.”

The post The Student Newspaper Suing Marco Rubio Over Targeted Deportations appeared first on The Intercept.

The administrator’s email instructed professors to give two warnings to “students or others who violate the Rules of University Conduct.” Afterward, professors and teaching assistants were told to call the campus Public Safety department if the students “involved in the disruption refuse to stop despite your request they do so” and “there is no immediate safety concern,” according to the email, which was obtained by The Intercept. The email referred to the instructions as “highly practical tips for addressing and de-escalating classroom disruptions.”

The email also instructed professors to call 911 “if the disruptive behavior is so severe that it poses an immediate threat to your safety or the safety of others.” Campus security officers are unarmed.

Columbia University emerged over the past year as a flashpoint of a renewed campus anti-war activism aimed at ending U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, as well as the war itself. After spreading to campuses across the country, the debate over the war has seen an unprecedented crackdown: thousands of arrests, brutal beatings of students and faculty by police, and existential questions about the limits of academic freedom when it comes to criticizing Israel. 

Columbia administrators’ admonitions to students and orders to professors — including a second campuswide email warning that a planned walkout would violate school rules — underscore how, as the fighting in the Middle East continues to escalate, the clampdown on student and faculty activism against the war will continue apace.

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After returning to campus this fall, Columbia students continued their calls from the prior year for the school to divest from companies with ties to Israel — the same cause that drove the encampments and occupation of Hamilton Hall in the spring. The protests had resulted in mass arrests and student suspensions. 

This semester, protests on campus have been few but have included a march outside the campus entrance; a sit-in at the School of International and Public Affairs protesting a class taught by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in September; as well as silent study-in protests inside Low Memorial Library. 

Ahead of Monday, the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine promoted a walkout just before noon at the steps in front of Low Library, encouraging students and workers at the school to leave classes and jobs. “No School. No Work. No business as usual,” the poster read. “The Palestinian resistance will free us all, it is our duty to join the fight.” Dozens of protesters had gathered in front of the library, its steps guarded by metal barriers, by noon on Monday, according to a livestream from the group. Over the weekend, students also gathered at the library steps to read the names of Palestinians killed in Gaza.

In a separate email also sent Sunday evening, Interim President Katrina Armstrong warned members of the Columbia community about “a period of uncertainty in the coming days.” Armstrong said the school would “increase public safety presence across campus for the next three days.”

She said the school was supporting some planned special events and nonviolent protests but was concerned about planned walkouts across New York City. Would-be campus participants in the walkout, she wrote, had not registered with the university — an implicit warning about the sanctions that have been meted out for unregistered protest activities. Armstrong said the walkout was not registered with campus’ administration and is not in compliance with its rules around protest.

“We have also learned and had evidence of plans of groups not affiliated with Columbia choosing to come to our Morningside campus for activities that raise concern about the potential for violence,” Armstrong wrote. She said Columbia was taking measures to address concerns about public safety and would suspend the use of QR codes for guest access at the school’s Morningside campus on Sunday and Monday and possibly later into the week. 

The campus on Monday was placed in the most restrictive security level with only individuals with campus IDs allowed inside.

Another email sent to faculty and staff at the School of Arts & Sciences said that school officials and security officers were coordinating with NYPD to make sure protests outside campus were far away enough to allow access into campus.

The post Columbia Law School Told Professors to Call Campus Police on Student Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.

As details about the warrants have emerged, however, so have allegations that federal agents misled the court and secured the warrants under “false pretenses,” as one of the students whose room was searched, Yunseo Chung, claimed in a lawsuit challenging her deportation.

The warrants were predicated on probable cause that Columbia was “harboring” students who were in the country illegally, court filings indicate. Chung, however, is a lawful permanent resident, notwithstanding the Trump administration’s efforts to deport her based on her arrest and citation at a Gaza sit-in. She has lived in the U.S. since she was 7 years old.

“The basis for this entire operation is constitutionally invalid.”

“The idea that they went before a federal magistrate judge and said, ‘We have to search Ms. Chung’s residence for evidence of Columbia harboring her’ — that shows they’re willing to lie to a judge,” said Nathan Yaffe, an immigration attorney.

Yaffe represents both Chung and the other Columbia student who was targeted by the search warrants, Ranjani Srinivasan, who left the country in mid-March.

Most of the materials relating to the search warrants remain under seal in federal court, and Columbia declined to comment on them, citing student privacy protections. ICE did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about the warrants.

“If the government falsified information to get the warrant, that is its own bundle of serious problems,” said Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, an attorney at Human Rights First who also represents Chung. “But even if not, the basis for this entire operation is constitutionally invalid.”

“Harboring and Concealing”?

The search warrants served on Columbia first became public through a late-night statement from the university on March 13, just five days after the jarring arrest of Mahmoud Khalil in the lobby of his Columbia apartment building. The school did not include the targeted students’ names, the specific buildings, or the government’s legal justification for searching them.

“I am writing heartbroken to inform you that we had federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in two University residences tonight,” Columbia interim president Katrina Armstrong wrote in her statement. Armstrong emphasized that university protocol “requires that law enforcement have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas” — which ICE satisfied by serving warrants signed by a federal magistrate judge.

“The University is obligated to comply with the law,” Armstrong wrote. “No one was arrested or detained. No items were removed, and no further action was taken.”

The next day, a top Justice Department official bragged about the unsuccessful raid in a speech. His remarks offered the first clues about the story the Trump administration told the federal judge who signed the warrants.

“Just last night we worked with the Department of Homeland Security to execute search warrants from an investigation into Columbia University for harboring and concealing illegal aliens on its campus,” said Todd Blanche, the U.S. deputy attorney general. Blanche offered no evidence in his speech to support the allegation against the university.

The federal anti-harboring statute makes it a crime to knowingly conceal noncitizens who are in the country illegally. Like many of the country’s laws around immigration, the anti-harboring provision is written in broad language, which the Trump administration has wielded to threaten legal aid organizations and other groups that advocate for immigrants’ rights.

Broad as the language is, however, the law still has concrete requirements. First, the people being “harbored” must lack legal status to be in the U.S. And “harboring” requires some sort of active concealment or obstruction, as opposed to simply declining to assist ICE in deportation.

Courts have differed in their particular definitions, but the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose precedent is binding in New York federal courts, has ruled that a conviction for “harboring” requires “conduct tending substantially to facilitate an alien’s remaining in the United States illegally and to prevent government authorities from detecting his unlawful presence.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has not defined “harboring,” but in 2023 it interpreted other parts of the same statute to require proof of the defendant’s specific intent to break the law.

The typical case under the harboring statute involves active concealment to help people who are undocumented or who have been ordered deported by an immigration judge to avoid being located by ICE, explained David Leopold, an immigration attorney. He contrasted that active concealment with sanctuary churches that have welcomed undocumented people to live in their facilities, which offered some protection against ICE raids. 

“The reason the churches weren’t charged with harboring,” Leopold said, “was that it was open and obvious that the person was living there. They weren’t hiding them surreptitiously.” 

“Legal Impossibility”

When federal agents sought search warrants targeting Srinivasan and Chung’s residences, the anti-harboring statute was the sole legal justification they offered to support probable cause of a federal crime, according to a copy of one of the warrants filed with Chung’s lawsuit.

So far, the government hasn’t offered evidence, at least not publicly, that Columbia was taking any active steps to obstruct ICE or conceal anyone on its campus. More fundamentally, both Chung and Srinivasan came to the U.S. entirely lawfully, and neither had appeared before an immigration judge, much less received a deportation order.

On March 5, Srinivasan learned that the State Department was revoking her student visa in an email from the U.S. consulate in India. In the following days, ICE agents visited her apartment building at Columbia twice without a warrant, threatening through the door to keep coming back until they put her in deportation proceedings.

On March 11, after Columbia informed Srinivasan that she had been withdrawn from enrollment because of her revoked visa and urged her to meet with immigration agents, she boarded a flight to Canada rather than fight her deportation. ICE was apparently unaware that Srinivasan was no longer in the U.S. when three agents searched her room two days later.

“We have a warrant to search this premises for electronics and documents related to Ranjani Srinivasan,” a masked ICE agent explained to Srinivasan’s roommate, according to video reviewed by The Intercept. Before leaving, the agent identified himself as special agent Brian Carlucci and left her a copy of the search warrant, which he signed.

ICE did not follow the proper steps to revoke Srinivasan’s legal status in the country, Yaffe told The Intercept, which means she was always in the country lawfully.

“In my view it was unfounded to seek to execute a warrant for ‘harboring’ her,” Yaffe said, That “layer of pretext is not as clearcut” for Srinivasan as it was for Chung, he said, given the latter’s green card.

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Chung and her attorneys first heard from DHS agents on March 9 that the State Department had determined she should be deported under the same arcane legal provision that Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked against Khalil, who also has a green card.

On Thursday, Rubio told reporters he had revoked more than 300 students’ visas so far, and was finding new ones to revoke daily.

Whatever power Rubio may have to revoke visas and green cards over otherwise protected speech — which is currently being tested in numerous lawsuits by students who have been detained or threatened with deportation — his pronouncements do not immediately transform a lawful resident into an unlawful one, Chung’s attorneys told a federal court on Tuesday.

“No matter what Secretary Rubio says, she remains a permanent resident until the immigration court decides otherwise.”

“No matter what Secretary Rubio says, she remains a permanent resident until the immigration court decides otherwise,” attorney Ramzi Kassem said at the hearing. “And as long as she’s a permanent resident, she cannot be ‘harbored.’ The statute does not apply to her.”

Chung’s court filings did not include the more detailed affidavits that the agents submitted to federal Magistrate Judge Robert W. Lehrburger on March 13, which remain under seal.

“I can’t imagine what truthfully could have been said in those affidavits to make the harboring statute relevant,” Colangelo-Bryan said.

Chung’s lawsuit asserts the warrants were “obtained on false pretenses” and were just pretext to get close enough to arrest her and Srinivasan. In their warrant application, the government indicated to the judge that agents were searching for records related to the students’ “affiliation with Columbia University,” such as lease agreements, student conduct materials, and communications with the school.

ICE executed both warrants at Columbia between 9 and 10 p.m. on March 13, according to court filings. Yet they didn’t seize anything during their searches.

“It’s clear that they that they were not actually searching for anything relating to those documents,” Yaffe said, “leaving aside that it’s a legal impossibility to ‘harbor’ Ms. Chung.”

Other attorneys have been even more strident than Chung’s legal team in demanding answers about how the warrants were issued.

“Excuse the profanity, but this is absolutely fucking insane,” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, in a social media post, “and such a clear overreach that I can’t believe a magistrate judge authorized a warrant here.”

After the hearing on Tuesday, a different federal judge, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the District Court, issued a temporary restraining order that bars the Trump administration from detaining Chung or moving her out of the state, as ICE did with Khalil and other student activists.

Buchwald’s order did not address Chung’s allegations about the search warrants, although she noted in the hearing that she had pulled the government’s affidavit from court files and was reviewing it.

Correction: March 28, 2025, 5:49 p.m. ET
A previous version of this article misstated the month that ICE visited Ranjani Srinivasan’s apartment without a warrant. It was March, not May. 

The post ICE Got Warrants Under “False Pretenses,” Claims Columbia Student Targeted Over Gaza Protests 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.

As they feared, Homeland Security Investigations, the intelligence division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was intent to track them both down. As agents scrambled to find Taal and Thomas-Johnson, HSI sent subpoenas to Google and Meta for sensitive data information about their Gmail, Facebook, and Instagram accounts.

In Thomas-Johnson’s case, The Intercept found, Google handed over data to ICE before notifying him or giving him an opportunity to challenge the subpoena. By the time he found out about the data demand, Thomas-Johnson had already left the U.S.

During the first Trump administration, tech companies publicly fought federal subpoenas on behalf of their users who were targeted for protected speech — sometimes with great fanfare. With ICE ramping up its use of dragnet tools to meet its deportation quotas and smoke out noncitizens who protest Israel’s war on Gaza, Silicon Valley’s willingness to accommodate these kinds of subpoenas puts those who speak out at greater risk.

Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York who has studied ICE’s use of administrative subpoenas, said she was concerned but not surprised that Google complied with the subpoena about Thomas-Johnson’s account without notifying him.

“Subpoenas can easily be used and the person never knows,” Nash told The Intercept. “It’s problematic to have a situation in which people who are targeted by these subpoenas don’t have an opportunity to vindicate their rights.”

Google declined to discuss the specifics of the subpoenas, but the company said administrative subpoenas like these do not include facts about the underlying investigation.

“Our processes for handling law enforcement subpoenas are designed to protect users’ privacy while meeting our legal obligations,” said a Google spokesperson in an emailed statement. “We review every subpoena and similar order for legal validity, and we push back against those that are overbroad or improper, including objecting to some entirely.”

ICE agents sent the administrative subpoenas to Google and Meta by invoking a broad legal provision that gives immigration officers authority to demand documents “relating to the privilege of any person to enter, reenter, reside in, or pass through the United States.”

One recent study based on ICE records found agents invoke this same provision hundreds of times each year in administrative subpoenas to tech companies. Another study found ICE’s subpoenas to tech companies and other private entities “overwhelmingly sought information that could be used to locate ICE’s targets.”

Unlike search warrants, administrative subpoenas like these do not require a judge’s signature or probable cause of a crime, which means they are ripe for abuse.

HSI had flagged Taal to the State Department following “targeted analysis to substantiate aliens’ alleged engagement of antisemitic activities,” according to an affidavit later filed in court by a high-ranking official. This analysis amounted to a trawl of online articles about Taal’s participation in Gaza protests and run-ins with the Cornell administration. The State Department revoked Taal’s visa, and ICE agents in upstate New York began searching for him.

In mid-March, the week after Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in New York City, Taal sued the Trump administration, seeking an injunction that would have blocked ICE from detaining him too. By this point, he and Thomas-Johnson had both left their campus housing at Cornell and were hiding from ICE in a house 10 miles outside Ithaca.

Two days after Taal filed his suit, still unable to track him down, ICE sent an administrative subpoena to Meta. According to notices Meta emailed to Taal, the subpoena sought information about his Instagram and Facebook accounts. Meta gave Taal 10 days to challenge the subpoena in court before the company would comply and hand over data about his accounts to ICE.

Like Google, Meta declined to discuss the subpoena it received about Taal’s account, referring The Intercept to a webpage about the company’s compliance with data demands.

A week later, HSI sent another administrative subpoena to Google regarding Taal’s Gmail account, according to a notice Google sent him the next day.

“It was a phishing expedition,” Taal said in a text message to The Intercept.

After Taal decided to leave the country and dismissed his lawsuit in April, ICE withdrew its subpoenas for his records.

Do you have information about DHS or ICE targeting activists online? Use a personal device to contact Shawn Musgrave on Signal at shawnmusgrave.82

But on the last day of March, HSI sent yet another subpoena, this one to Google for information about Thomas-Johnson’s Gmail account. Without giving Thomas-Johnson any advance warning or the opportunity to challenge it, Google complied with the subpoena, and it only notified him weeks later. 

“Google has received and responded to legal process from a Law Enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account,” read an email Google sent him in early May.

By this point, Thomas-Johnson had already left the country too. He fled after a friend was detained at the Tampa airport, handed a note with Thomas-Johnson’s name on it, and asked repeatedly about his whereabouts, he told The Intercept.

Thomas-Johnson’s lawyer, who also represented Taal, reached out to an attorney for Google about the demand for his client’s account information.

“Google has already fulfilled this subpoena,” Google’s attorney replied by email, further explaining that Google’s “production consisted of basic subscriber information,” such as the name, address, and phone number associated with the account. Google did not produce “the contents of communications, metadata regarding those communications, or location information,” the company’s attorney wrote.

“This is the extent that they will go to be in support of genocide,” Taal said of the government’s attempts to locate him using subpoenas.

Correction: September 16, 2025, 12:40 p.m. ET
The story has been updated to correct the spelling of Amandla Thomas-Johnson’s last name.

The post Google Secretly Handed ICE Data About Pro-Palestine Student Activist 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.

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