Though the university gave in smaller amounts to pro-Israel groups before the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups, the spending ramped up in that fiscal year as the genocide in Gaza unfolded and Columbia led the way in a national campus protest movement against it.

In contrast to its pro-Israel giving, according to an analysis of documents which track some of the money given by tax-exempt nonprofits, the school gave little or no such funds to pro-Palestine, Arab, or Muslim groups over the same period.

“It confirms our worst suspicions since fall of 2023 that pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian politics are the official policy of this institution,” Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics at Columbia and a Jewish member of the university’s faculty, told The Intercept. “You could have surmised that from the institution’s actions and speech, but it appears to also be revealed in its resource allocation.”

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A Columbia spokesperson said the grants went through a university-administered donor-advised fund, an arrangement where a nonprofit organization pools tax-deductible donations and lets the donors request to make specific distributions to other charities.  

“These grants did not come from Columbia’s operating funds and were payments distributed from a donor-advised fund established at Columbia in accordance with IRS rules,” the Columbia spokesperson said. 

Donor-advised funds have become increasingly common ways for contributors to hide their identities when making gifts.

“It’s just so opaque,” Mark De Fusco, an expert on financial transactions in higher educational institutions and former researcher at the Pullias Center for Higher Education, told The Intercept. “So, you can essentially make donations and not be identified.”

“Deeply Invested in the Genocide”

In the fiscal year ending in June 2024, Columbia paid $100,000 to the Israel on Campus Coalition and another $75,000 to AIPAC affiliate American Israel Education Foundation.

In the same period, the Columbia administration summarily suspended the pro-Palestine student groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, quashed the encampments in solidarity with Gaza, and called on the New York City Police Department to arrest pro-Palestine protesters on campus on two separate occasions.

The protesters had been demanding that Columbia disclose its financial ties to Israel and pro-Israel organizations and divest from them.

“The whole reason why we were protesting in the first place is because we knew that they were deeply invested in the genocide in Gaza,” said Maryam Alwan, a Palestinian American activist who participated in the campus protests in solidarity with Gaza before graduating from Columbia in 2025. “These findings confirm what we’ve been saying all along.”

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While grants to American universities and medical research centers dominate past tax filings by Columbia, the pro-Israel organizations stand out as a rare few that prioritize relations with a specific foreign country. In 2024, over 170 of the 440 payments in this category were toward higher education and over 120 went to healthcare initiatives.

The payments by Columbia to the pro-Israel organizations were listed by the university as being for “program services,” though the term is not publicly defined by the university.

The Pro-Israel Beneficiaries

In fiscal year ending in June 2025, Columbia paid $7,200 to the Anti-Defamation League for “program services.” In the same period, the ADL welcomed the arrest of a lead Columbia protest negotiator Mahmoud Khalil by federal immigration officials. (None of the pro-Israel organizations that received Columbia cash responded to requests for comment.)

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Details about any services offered by the ADL to Columbia in that period were not mentioned or publicized by the university. In July 2025, Columbia announced it was partnering with the ADL to conduct “programming and training” on antisemitism. A month before the announcement of the partnership, ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt compared pro-Palestinian student protesters to Islamist terrorists.

“Columbia should be investing in its students, not bankrolling organizations that intimidate them,” Khalil told The Intercept. “This is what happens when a university is controlled by ideologues on its Board of Trustees whose commitment to Israel appears to matter more than their fiduciary duty, academic freedom, or the students they are supposed to serve.”

The pro-Israel organizations that received payments from Columbia stand out from the rest of the university’s beneficiaries in its filings. While a small number of ethnic community organizations such as the Dominican Women’s Development Center and the Caribbean Women’s Health Association are listed as having received funding from the school in its disclosures, these groups largely operate in the diaspora and are not advocating for U.S. relations with a foreign nation.

The choice to fund organizations that specifically advocate for Israel struck several students, alumni, and faculty members with whom The Intercept discussed the findings as odd.

“At this point, Columbia cares about one thing and one thing only, which is the money of its donors and the ideological interests that those donors espouse,” said Aharon Dardik, an Israeli student who graduated from Columbia earlier this year and who had previously been court-martialed for refusing to serve in the Israeli military.

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One of the beneficiary organizations receiving money from Columbia, the American Israel Education Foundation, describes itself on its website as “the charitable organization affiliated with AIPAC, America’s pro-Israel lobby.” The group is best known for funding trips for members of Congress to visit Israel. Over the past decade, Columbia has paid AIPAC’s charity arm $250,000, with a $75,000 payment in the fiscal year ending in June 2023 and a $100,000 payment in the one ending in June 2017.

Another beneficiary organization, the Israel on Campus Coalition, says its role is to put pro-Israel campus activism under one umbrella and work toward a future “where the anti-Israel movement is marginalized.” The group offered a fellowship at Columbia; the school’s website lists one student as having received the fellowship from 2022 to 2024.

Columbia also paid $450,000 to the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York in the fiscal year ending in June 2024. UJA says on its website that, since October 7, 2023, the organization spent hundreds of millions of dollars in Israel, including tens of millions to support Israeli soldiers and their families.

A review of these financial contributions, adding up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past three years, have brought Columbia’s process for donating to beneficiary organizations into sharp focus.

“People talking about institutional neutrality; there’s no institutional neutrality,” said a Columbia student who did not wish to be identified due to concerns over retaliation. “Columbia has always been very pro-Israel, and this just goes to show that that’s where their real commitments are.”

The post Columbia Gives Big Money to Pro-Israel Groups — But Not to Pro-Palestine Ones 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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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.

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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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.

In the U.S., Rowan is simultaneously helping ensure a pro-Israel political project has no problem with money. Since the start of this year, according to Federal Election Commission filings, the billionaire CEO of Apollo Global Management has donated $1.5 million to the United Democracy Project, a super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, spending a fraction of his vast wealth to preserve a foreign policy defined by support for Israel’s genocide and the flow of U.S. weapons to Israel. 

Rowan — who is worth more than $8 billion and reportedly consulted on his business with convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein — is an executive member of Trump’s “Board of Peace,” a United Nations-approved body tasked with carrying out Trump’s stalled plan for Gaza. He made his first donation to UDP of the year in early March, giving $1 million, filings show, just as the group began spending aggressively against the now-ousted Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., a loud critic of U.S. support for Israel. 

A second donation for $500,000 arrived on July 23. The same day, the AIPAC super PAC shelled out nearly $50,000 in campaign mailers in Michigan to attack the progressive pro-Palestine candidate for U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed. In Missouri, it dropped another $100,000 for phone banking services against former Democratic Rep. Cori Bush in her race against pro-Israel incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell. 

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It’s not clear which specific UDP efforts have been backed by Rowan’s largesse, and neither Rowan nor UDP responded to requests for comment. But Raed Jarrar, advocacy director with Democracy for the Arab World Now, connected Rowan’s position on Trump’s Gaza board and his major part as a donor to AIPAC’s super PAC as a matter of transparency. 

“Now he sits on a board that will decide Gaza’s future,” Jarrar told The Intercept. “Palestinians did not choose him, and neither did American voters. Americans and Palestinians alike deserve to know whose interests are actually being served.”

Rowan, a major donor to Trump’s failed 2020 presidential campaign, has long made his animus toward critics of Israel known. In recent years, he has been a fierce advocate against student protesters calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza, broadly mischaracterizing their anti-genocide calls as “antisemitic,” and played a key role in ousting leaders at his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, over their handling of the protests. In 2025, he served as a consultant to the White House in its recent attacks on higher education. He donated an initial $250,000 to UDP in 2022, the year the AIPAC super PAC was founded, and more than quadrupled his giving by 2024. Trump appointed him to the Board of Peace this past January.

“Marc Rowan has used his position to try to silence Palestinians and smear students protesting Israel’s genocide,” said Margaret DeReus, executive director of Peace, Accountability, and Leadership PAC, which launched this cycle as a pro-Palestine counterweight to the pro-Israel lobby. PAL PAC backed both El-Sayed and Bush, who have committed to cutting military aid to Israel. (El-Sayed prevailed in his Democratic Senate primary against Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens, while both Bush and Massie lost their races.)

Rowan “gives millions to fund the now-fringe idea that billions of our tax dollars should fund the Israeli military and targets candidates who are calling to stop sending U.S. tax dollars to Israel’s genocide,” DeReus said. She added that his presence on “Trump’s corrupt board” lays bare the actual goal of the governing body: “the continued genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians living in Gaza.”

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As support for Israel among the American people has plummeted, and more leftist candidates run on promises to enact an arms embargo on Israel, AIPAC has broken its own spending records and set new ones, helping make El-Sayed and Massie’s primaries among the most expensive ever. In Congress, the lobbying giant has also worked to consolidate power among its pro-Israel base. In July, AIPAC lobbied members for the passage of a Pentagon program that further enmeshes military technological sharing between the U.S. and Israeli militaries. Last week, Democratic leadership appointed three hawkish, pro-Israel, and AIPAC-backed Democrats to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

In addition to his AIPAC super PAC spending, Rowan has also directly given to a host of pro-Israel candidates this cycle, including New Jersey Democrats Rep. Josh Gottheimer and Sen. Cory Booker, as well as Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig in her failed Senate bid.

The majority of Rowan’s spending, however, has been in favor of Republicans, including Mike Rogers, who is facing off against El-Sayed; Florida Sen. Ashley Moody, a vocal opponent of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement; and Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and former Israeli Defense Forces volunteer who famously wore his IDF uniform to Congress.

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AIPAC has long championed Trump’s plan for Gaza, which has included overt calls to displace Palestinians, and supports Israel’s hard line in its negotiations with Hamas leaders. Israel, which occupies nearly 70 percent of Gaza, has refused to withdraw its military from the Strip. Israel blames Hamas for refusing to disarm, though the Palestinian militant and political group has said it would only surrender its weapons in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal and the establishment of a Palestinian state — conditions the Israeli government has refused.

AIPAC also regularly celebrates the ongoing bombardment of the Strip, where more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes since the so-called ceasefire was brokered, including this week when bombing killed two children.

In Rowan’s view, there’s money to be made from the carnage. At the meeting in Washington, D.C., this past February — when Trump also pledged $10 billion in public funds to the board — Rowan fired off property value estimates in Gaza, more than 80 percent of which lies in ruins. He cited a coastline valued at $50 billion; a housing stock, if rebuilt, worth $30 billion; and infrastructure projects worth another $30 billion. Rowan spoke next to generic renderings of glistening high-rise apartments, palm tree-laden highways, solar power plants, and coastal oil depots. Consolidating all of these assets under the supervision of Trump’s Board of Peace, Rowan said, would allow for “conflict-free management of the resources to benefit the Gazans.”

“One hundred fifteen billion of value,” he promised. “It just needs to be unlocked and financed.” 

The post “Board of Peace” Billionaire Backs AIPAC Fund Targeting Pro-Palestine Candidates appeared first on The Intercept.

It’s easy to say but harder to prove. Doing empirical analysis that shows these biases is time-consuming and complex, full of pitfalls and nuances that can muddy the picture. Yet the double standards are everywhere — and there are ways to do sober, qualitative work that elucidates not only the differences in how Israeli and Palestinian life are covered, but also also in how other recent conflicts are covered.

For my new book “How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza,” I attempt to demonstrate, beyond a reasonable doubt, that U.S. media coverage of the war on Gaza was one-sided, racist, dehumanizing, and often veered into outright incitement.

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I examined over 12,000 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN.com, Politico, Axios, USA Today, and The Associated Press, along with 5,000 TV segments that aired on CNN and MSNBC. The focus is on center-left media outlets influential with the Biden administration during the first year of the conflict — with an emphasis on the first few months, when Israel firmly established its narrative justifying the genocide, rendering mass death inevitable.

Here are seven statistical findings that prove the U.S. media’s bias against Palestinians.

Israel’s “Right to Defend Itself”

The media’s penchant for invoking a nation’s “right to defend itself,” typically followed by the rationalization of mass civilian killing, was reserved almost exclusively for Israel. On CNN and MSNBC, guests, anchors, and reporters mentioned the right to self-defense for Israel 94 times more than they did for Palestinians. In print media, Israel was afforded this right over 100 times more frequently than Palestinians in Gaza.

Watch a supercut below of the phrase being repeated on TV news.

“Human Shields” to Justify Killing Palestinians

News outlets frequently apply the term “human shields” to any instance where a guerrilla force operates near civilian infrastructure — a definition rejected by human rights groups, but used by partisans to explain away civilian deaths. That didn’t stop media outlets from invoking the term hundreds of times about civilians near Palestinian fighters, implicitly justifying their deaths in Israeli attacks. On the other hand, my analysis of TV news showed no mention at all of the Israeli military’s use of “human shields” — despite documented cases where Israel’s tactics meet the legal definition.

Emotive Words About Killing Civilians

Cable networks and print media outlets consistently applied a double standard in favor of Israel when using the terms “massacre,” “barbaric,” “savage,” and “slaughter” to describe the killing of civilians. Over a 100-day period that saw roughly 24,000 Palestinians killed, the use of these emotive words in the print media I surveyed was entirely in favor of Israel. (I only included instances when the words appeared in outlets’ own editorial voices, not when they quoted commentators or officials.)

Watch supercuts below of U.S. news personalities using the phrase “savage.”

Using “Hamas-Run” to Downplay Palestinian Deaths

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After the October 17 bombing of Gaza’s al-Ahli Arab hospital by Israel, media outlets almost uniformly adopted pro-Israel pressure groups’ pejorative qualifiers “Hamas-run” or “Hamas-controlled” to describe Palestinian death counts, thereby discrediting them. Neither CNN nor MSNBC used the term between October 7 and October 17, 2023, but it quickly skyrocketed in usage as the body count in Gaza grew — with the use of a related phrase becoming an official policy at CNN. This, despite the U.S. State Department, World Health Organization, Human Rights Watch, and others’ long use of Gaza Health Ministry figures.

Sympathetic Victims: Gaza vs. Ukraine

Victims of Israel’s attack on Gaza who could be expected to elicit sympathy from audiences — like journalists and children — received little coverage during the first 100 days of Israel’s assault, compared to their counterparts in Ukraine.

Antisemitism vs. Islamophobia

While incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia were on the rise in the months after October 7, coverage focused almost entirely on antisemitism with little or no regard for anti-Muslim bigotry or how the mass killing in Gaza impacted Palestinians stateside. This was especially true on college campuses, where students protesting Israel’s war were tarred as antisemites in the mainstream press, while Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students who faced discrimination barely received any attention.

Campus Antisemitism vs. Killing Children in Gaza

For a poignant example of how Palestinians are dehumanized, consider the media’s treatment of former Harvard University President Claudine Gay in comparison to their coverage, or lack thereof, of the killing of Hind Rajab. Not long after Gay resigned under pressure from Congress amid a monthslong fixation on allegations of antisemitism on college campuses and allegations of plagiarism by Gay over 20 years prior, the Israeli military opened fire on a car carrying Rajab and her family and left the 5-year-old Palestinian girl to die. On the New York Times homepage, stories about Gay appeared in 15 of the 31-day period covering the height of the scandal, whereas Rajab didn’t appear once in the month that followed her death.

Correction: May 15, 2026
A caption for the “Emotive Words on TV” graphic misstated the specific Sunday shows where the mention of “massacre,” “slaughter,” and “brutal” were counted; they were the ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN Sunday shows — not CNN, MSNBC Sunday shows. The visual ratios on the bars were also updated on the graphics for child casualties and mention of war crimes to accurately reflect the scales.

The post We Analyzed Thousands of News Articles: Here’s the Proof of Pro-Israel Bias in Mainstream Media appeared first on The Intercept.

Even before federal immigration agents descended on communities around the country, killing immigrants and protesters, unmarked agents were abducting students who had voiced criticisms of Israel. 

Mahmoud Khalil was the first. After federal agents detained him at his alma mater, Columbia University, he spent more than 100 days in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Louisiana. It’s been over a year since he was released and returned to live with his family in New York City. The Trump administration is still trying to deport him. 

“Part of why I’m doing this right now rather than waiting 10 years or 20 years is because what’s happening now in ICE detention is a stain on the U.S. conscience,” Khalil tells The Intercept Briefing. “I don’t want to look back in 20 years and reckon with what’s happening. I want to stop the killing now. I want to stop the disappearances now. I want to stop the cruelty now.”

This week on the podcast, Khalil speaks with host Akela Lacy about what he’s learned about how he became President Donald Trump’s top target, the role Columbia University played in that campaign, and his new book, “No Land to Stand On,” which chronicles Khalil’s experience in ICE detention, missing the birth of his first child, his ongoing saga to stay in the U.S. with his family, and more.

“It’s been so difficult just to have that conversation with my wife Noor about what would happen,” Khalil says. “What are we doing? Is it worth the fight? Should we just leave? But to me, this fight isn’t only about whether I get to stay in this country.”

“It’s about whether anyone — whether they are citizens or non-citizens — are able to speak out against government policies and against the support of Israel in this country. It goes down to a very basic thing: If they are able to deport someone for their views on Palestine, they would be able to deport anyone on their views, whether it is pro-Palestine or pro-Israel or anything.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

It’s been almost three years since the October 7 attacks in Israel that preceded the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In that time, Israel has destroyed an entire region, killed more than 70,000 people and injured scores more, launched attacks on surrounding countries, and drawn the U.S. into a full-blown war with Iran. 

Over the last three years, at home in the U.S., something else fundamentally shattered. If anything is different now, it’s the honesty of it all. Free speech, civil rights, and equal protection under the law — of course, with all the appropriate exceptions. 

What started as a bipartisan commitment to suppressing criticism of Israel led to flagrant abductions of pro-Palestine students by unmarked immigration agents. 

Since the crackdown on students escalated in the early months of Trump’s second term, ICE’s war has spread even further. 

Since Trump reentered the White House, ICE has detained more than half a million people and says it’s deported almost twice that. More people are dying in ICE custody or at the hands of federal agents, who have killed at least eight people since January 2025, including two protesters in Minneapolis. 

Our guest today lives at this nexus: how the siege on Gaza fueled a reckoning at home and fused America’s anti-immigrant push with its battle over speech on Palestine. 

Mahmoud Khalil was the first person taken by ICE over student activism for Palestine last year. Khalil, who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, fled the country at 18. He later moved to the U.S. to attend graduate school at Columbia University, where he emerged as a leader during student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. After being released from ICE detention last year, Khalil returned to living in New York, where he continues to fight against the threat of deportation. He joins me now. 

Mahmoud Khalil, welcome to The Intercept Briefing. 

Mahmoud Khalil: Thank you so much for having me.

AL: To start, I want to ask about your family. You were being held at a remote ICE detention center in Louisiana when your son, Deen, was born last year. How is Deen now? 

MK: He’s a wonderful, wild 17-month-old. So he’s walking all over now, and it just feels so rewarding really to have him in our life right now, especially in a very difficult moment in our family.

I get so much inspiration from him and that pushes me to continue to work because this is not only about my family. It’s a story of so many families who this administration separated and inflicted violence upon them. It’s also a story of so many Palestinian families in Palestine whose fathers are in Israeli prisons [who] can’t meet their families, or even the ones in Gaza who are disappeared right now.

AL: I’m sure you and Noor talk about this, how you will tell Deen your story, and when. What are those conversations like?

MK: I try to push it as much as possible because usually you tell a story that already happened, but my story is still happening. Every day there’s something new.

And that’s what made writing the book difficult for me, because usually you write a memoir about a memory about something that has already happened to you. While, to me, I am now living it. So how would I write about it? That was like so difficult for me.

The same way about telling Deen about it: Would it be a happy story or a sad story? Would it be a story that, in fact, the legal system stood up for the unlawful detention of his father and the attempts to deport him — or it did not? Is it that the people in this country advocated for his father and the rights of so many other people in this country — or not? That’s still to be told, so I don’t want to really jump to conclusions at all. 

Part of why I’m doing this right now, rather than waiting 10 years or 20 years, is because what’s happening now in ICE detention is a stain on the U.S. conscience. So is the Palestine exception: the fact that freedom of speech, rule of law, basic dignities are afforded to everyone except for Palestinians. I don’t want to look back in 20 years and reckon with what’s happening. I want to stop the killing now. I want to stop the disappearances now. I want to stop the cruelty now.

AL: You were released from ICE detention last summer. What have the last 16 months in your life been like? 

MK: It’s been a saga with courts but also just as a family, with a new family now, like trying to really live our life. Try to build our future in a country that at least promised me some sort of stability and safety after living in Syria and then in Lebanon. So it’s been difficult to find that stability and that permanence in our lives. It is a fight to me, like it’s been since then.

It’s been so difficult, of course, just to have that conversation with Noor, my wife Noor, about what would happen. What are we doing? Is it worth the fight? Should we just, like, leave? But to me, this fight isn’t only about whether I get to stay in this country. It’s also about whether those speaking out for Palestine have the right to do so without being punished by the administration or by the government, whether it’s the Trump administration or another. So that’s why I feel like it’s a bigger fight than just about me or about our family.

But at the end of the day, we are people. I want to go to Bryant Park and just watch the movies there, but I can’t do that easily. There’s several precautions I have to do to be able to actually do this very normal activity that any couple would do on a normal day. But it is the cost, unfortunately, that was imposed upon me by ICE and the Trump administration.

AL: To your point, this is something that’s happening at multiple levels. And you write in the book that you were given the option to “self-deport” — to where, we don’t know. But you say that you felt like if you did that, you wouldn’t just be succumbing to this false smear campaign, but you would be giving the federal government the blueprint for how to silence dissent. You also talk about this being a story about the horrors of the broader immigration detention system in the United States.

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As of early July, more than 65,000 people are currently being held in immigration detention. You write in your book about your experience in Louisiana at LaSalle and the relationships you built with other people being held there, trading noodles. What was that like for you? You talk a lot about the psychological effects of some of the things: constant bright lights so you can’t sleep, constant freezing cold air. Can you describe the conditions of the facility that you were in?

MK: As I’ve mentioned, what’s happening behind ICE detention walls is a stain on the U.S. conscience. The fact that you have over 65,000 people at any moment detained in what’s called civil detention. That’s what they call ICE detention. And there’s nothing civil about detention. Even if it was a five-star condition, it’s still detention. You’re still separated from your family.

But I met in ICE detention so many incredible fathers and workers who came here seeking safety only to be snatched off the street, only to be told that they are criminals and they do not belong here.

I remember, and I talk in my book about, Najib, a man who was snatched off his immigration hearing — leaving behind his wife battling cancer with four little kids. Or Alexander, who came here begging for safety, begging for a place to stay, only to be told, “No, you should be safe where you’re from.” And when he was deported, he got killed.

They want to make these conditions so bad you don’t fight for your case, because you can fight your case, but that could take six months to two years, three years.

AL: Even if you win.

MK: Even if you win. That’s the fact. That’s how they weaponize the immigration system against you. Even if you win, you lose. They can appeal multiple times — not once or twice. Because it’s a kangaroo court. The system is so favorable to the administration, and the administration can change at any time.

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That’s why you rarely find now anyone who would win in the immigration system, because it’s fully controlled by this administration. To me, it doesn’t make sense that you call it courts, or an impartial system, or a neutral system. It’s a very partial system to the administration.

That’s why they keep the lights on all the time. That’s why the temperature is down; it’s always cold. The food is pretty bad. You only have a thin blanket. Because they don’t want you to feel comfortable or have the basics to fight your case.

AL: You’re very much still in limbo. It’s been almost six months since the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a final ruling in one of your cases ordering your removal. Last week, that same body denied a request to reopen your case.

I know your team is looking at bringing your case to the Supreme Court. What’s the latest there? And when will you know if you have to leave the country? 

MK: So 18 months since my arrest, the Trump administration has never brought any piece of evidence that I committed any crime. They haven’t even charged me with any crime because they know they control the immigration system.

So now we’re appealing our case to the Supreme Court — an Article III court — to look into the matter. Because what the Trump administration’s trying until now is to prevent me from even looking into the merits of the case that they are bringing against me. What they are claiming is that this case is purely an immigration case, and only immigration judges should be able to look at it. Then if you want to go to a federal court, it should go to the 5th Circuit or the courts in Texas and Louisiana, who are pretty much favorable to the administration as well.

So they are trying to prevent a federal court from looking into this matter. We are now taking it to the Supreme Court because no government should have the power to detain someone without any independent judgment into it.

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Usually, the basics in criminal law are that you are innocent until proven guilty. What they’re trying to do now in immigration is the total opposite: You are guilty until you are proven innocent — but you might be deported before then. So it is a long fight. But once again, this fight is not only about my ability to stay in this country. It’s more than this.

It’s about whether anyone — whether they are citizens or non-citizens — are able to speak out against government policies and against the support of Israel in this country.

It goes down to a very basic thing: If they are able to deport someone for their views on Palestine, they would be able to deport anyone on their views, whether it is pro-Palestine or pro-Israel or anything.

AL: You and your team have expressed concerns that any ruling at the Supreme Court could backfire and further curtail the rights of pro-Palestine students. I wonder if you can you talk more about that? 

MK: For now, what we’re taking to the Supreme Court is only whether a federal court has jurisdiction to look into constitutional claims. For me, my constitutional claim is that the Trump administration wanted to deport me because of my activism on Palestine.

That’s what we’re bringing right now to the Supreme Court. This wouldn’t necessarily directly impact or have a larger impact on the movement as a whole. But already the government is doing everything in its power to chill the speech of whether students or citizens who are speaking out for Palestine. So what we’re trying is actually to prevent that. 

But the other part is, we seek accountability also from the public themselves. You don’t get accountability only through courts. You get accountability through the people who are now voting in progressive candidates into Congress who may be able to change the law.

That’s how I get accountability. I get accountability when I see that my book is out and people are reading what this administration tried to silence — that they want to make an example out of me, but they failed. That’s how we seek accountability. It’s not only from the court itself, because at the end of the day, people who create the law actually push for the law.

Because everything we got right now, the rights that American citizens or anyone on this land have, it was a product of a fight. Whether it’s a fight during the civil rights movement or the anti-slavery movement before then. It did not happen because a judge woke up and decided to do what’s right. It’s because, actually, people pushed for that to happen, and that’s my part of the fight right now.

AL: Mahmoud, you were not a random target. We know now that ICE took names from the pro-Israel doxing group Canary Mission to create a list of targets. Far-right pro-Israel groups like Canary Mission and the USA chapter of the militant, ultra-Zionist group Betar — considered by even the Anti-Defamation League as an anti-Muslim hate group — targeted you. 

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Betar later claimed credit for ICE’s abduction of you and other students and said it shared “thousands” of — we know now it was about 5,000 — names of pro-Palestine students with the Trump administration for further action. In the lead-up to your abduction, Betar targeted you by name, as did actors at your alma mater, Columbia University: another group, Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia, and a professor, Shai Davidai, who called specifically for the Trump administration to deport and arrest you in the days leading up to that abduction and tagged Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

You write in the book: “What I did not anticipate was the U.S. government would one day consider the recommendation of hostile Zionist groups to target me, and then act on it.”

You sued for communications between these groups and the Trump administration. What more have you found out about how much they coordinated to target and arrest you and other students? 

MK: The targeting of me and other pro-Palestine protesters was written in a document called Project Esther that was produced by the Heritage Foundation. In there, what they said [was], for this plan to work, we need a friendly administration that would listen to us and work with us to implement it.

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That’s what happened after, because Stephen Miller was part of the Heritage Foundation or consulting for them, and then he became part of this administration, and actually worked on implementing this plan from A to Z.

From the discovery that the case in Massachusetts — AAUP v. Rubio— 

AL: This is the American Association of University Professors lawsuit against Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

MK: Secretary Rubio.

AL: Yes.

MK: A Reagan appointee found that the government officials conspired between themselves to deprive us from our freedom of speech. 

One of the ICE agents or one of the DHS agents testified that, “I’ve never seen something like this happen in our department, that such a request would come from really senior individuals in the administration.” So now what we are suing for is to see this communication between between these private actors, whether it is Canary Mission, the Heritage Foundation, Betar, and others as well, what we call Zionist hate groups, and these administrators, whether it’s Rubio, Stephen Miller, or DOJ, and the attorney general.

Because it was all in public. Betar went out and said, “We take credit for that. We actually communicated with the administration about that.” That’s what we know publicly. So now we’re asking for these communications. This case, we filed it in July, takes some time, but we’re hoping to really expose these networks that pushed anti-Palestinian bigotry to be institutionalized within the U.S. government itself.

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I got used to smear campaigns and doxing before my arrest. To me, that was part of an intimidation campaign to terrorize me not to speak out about Palestine.

To me, back then, the thought process was, usually they target your employer, they target your university, your father’s employers. I’m like, “Why would I work for anyone who doesn’t agree with my views on Palestine or who sees them as extreme? I don’t want to work for them.” 

You know, I never wore a mask [at Columbia] to hide my identity because the risk to me wasn’t that high. In Syria, I wore masks, because the risk back then was getting shot by [Bashar al] Assad forces or getting disappeared by mukhabarat, or intelligence officers.

I never imagined that what I fled from would happen to me in the U.S., the land of the free.

AL: After a quick break, more from Mahmoud Khalil, who has a new book, “No Land to Stand On.” We’ll be right back.

Welcome back. We’re speaking with Mahmoud Khalil, the first pro-Palestine student taken by ICE last year. 

You’ve filed three other lawsuits against the federal government and Columbia, and you are waiting for a response from the most recent suit which alleges a historical pattern of discrimination and retaliation against Palestinian students and pro-Palestinian activists, as well as a failure to address “coordinated harassment” against pro-Palestine students at your alma mater, the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

You’ve said that Columbia didn’t only ignore your concerns or documented harassment, but that the university facilitated your targeting and arrest by the Trump administration. 

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Of the suit, you said: “Columbia laid the groundwork for my targeting by the Trump administration through its deliberate indifference and discrimination aimed at intimidating Palestinian students.”

For listeners who might not be familiar with how Columbia handled protests against the genocide in Gaza, or its history trying to crush and later celebrate other student protest movements, against the Vietnam War or to divest from apartheid South Africa, can you tell us a little bit more about the role the school played here?

MK: When I applied to come to Columbia, I applied to come to an institution that had a long history of student activism, of standing up, at least the students of that institution standing up for human rights, whether it was during the ’60s and the civil rights movement or in the anti-apartheid South Africa, but also most recently, against private prisons, against fossil fuels. So it goes beyond that. 

That’s the institution I came to. But I was surprised — even before October 7 — the level of the anti-Palestinian racism on campus. For example, when we tried to bring Human Rights Watch to our school [in 2023], the school put so many hurdles in front of us to be able to host a 70-person event. I was shocked. Why would you prevent us from hosting such a reputable human rights organization to come and talk about apartheid in South Africa? The same happened when we tried to bring BDS — the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement — virtually on campus.

So on October 7, Columbia had a choice of being an example for other institutions around the country, of being a place where difficult conversations would be held, where they would stand up for human rights, where they would actually listen to their own students.

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Instead, Columbia employed surveillance systems against their own students, brutalized them. They called in the police about four times or more than four times in less than two years. Provided that, the last time Columbia called the police on campus was during the ’60s — like 60, 70 years ago.

They couldn’t contain the movement; they established a Gestapo-like office called the Office of the Institutional Equity that investigated every single Palestinian advocacy on campus, going after them with investigations. They brought private investigators; I remember being called by a private investigator that Columbia hired just to intimidate us.

AL: I spoke to students who got those calls, too, and they’re like, “What is this?”

MK: Exactly. Instead of just listening to their students, to their own students. These students were, most of them, 17 to 20 years old, watching a genocide happening in real time. 

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So that was the climate at Columbia. At the same time, they harbored these actors who were doxing us. As a Palestinian, I pleaded so many times to get protection from the university up until the day of my arrest.

AL: Right. The day before.

MK: The day before my arrest, March 7, I emailed the president. I knew she wouldn’t answer. But I wanted to keep the record because I emailed her before then in January when the first wave of doxing happened, and they did not do anything. 

A year later, when another student was kidnapped by ICE from Columbia, non-Palestinian, non-related-Palestinian student was detained by ICE — Columbia immediately issued a statement, immediately called lawyers, immediately called elected officials because that student did not have to do anything with Palestine.

I’m so glad that Columbia did that, but that’s what they should have done to me, to Mohsen [Mahdawi] and to Yunseo [Chung], to the other students who were targeted by ICE.

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But that’s again the Palestine exception in these institutions, where you have ideologues on the board of trustees of Columbia whose protection of Israel for them is much more important than protecting freedom of speech, than actually listening to their students, than the normal decency of just being board of trustees who have responsibility toward these institutions, but their loyalty was somewhere else.

AL: You’ve also mentioned future plans to sue other individuals at Columbia. In your suit against Trump, DHS, ICE and Rubio, your legal team cited reporting by me and my colleague Natasha Lennard on a network of faculty, alumni and other people at Columbia who were active in trying to target pro-Palestine students for deportation and arrest. You write in the book about coordination between Columbia students and faculty and some of these groups that smeared and doxed students. You write: “Those who fed our names to the machine continued to attend the school.”

What else have you learned about those people and those efforts? 

MK: I will continue to seek accountability until everyone who actively participated in me missing the birth of my child and me losing 104 days of my life, until they are all held accountable.

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I will not stop until I achieve that. I’m doing this up until now, with first suing the federal government, then the federal government and private actors. And the private actors also included some of the Columbia actors who were feeding our names to Canary Mission.

Because we have to think about this — Canary Mission and Betar, or the Heritage Foundation — they did not have people on the ground. The people on the ground were Columbia’s own students and faculty, who were not hiding that they were doxing us.

AL: They were sending billboard trucks all over New York.

MK: Exactly. So we got records about communication between some of the students at Columbia and Leo Terrell, the chief of the antisemitism task force in the DOJ, pushing them to target us, but also providing talking points that we later saw on Terrell’s own social media.

So that network goes beyond just random actors. It was a very coordinated effort to demonize our movement, to vilify the student movement that was rooted in human rights and equality and dignity. That’s why so many students joined this movement, not only Palestinians.

Palestinians at Columbia were barely 20, 30 students. But the movement that was built, it was built by Black students, by Asian students, by Jewish students. The coalition that was created as well, it had groups ranging from dancing groups, cultural groups, to the Young Democrats.

More than 100 groups joined together to call for Palestinian freedom, to call for the end of Columbia’s complicity in supporting Israel.

AL: Mahmoud, you mentioned this already, the logic of exception regarding Palestine. You write in the book about the logic of exception regarding Palestine, the idea that only certain categories of Palestinians are deserving of rights. You talk about how you’ve internalized that in some ways as well. 

This comes up in what I’ve noticed as attempts, even by well-meaning people, to paint you as “one of the good ones” among university students that have been portrayed otherwise, as an unruly mass of student protesters on a rampage in protesting this genocide. There was a similar effort around your Columbia colleague Mohsen Mahdawi, who was also targeted and abducted by ICE for his pro-Palestine activism. 

During the Columbia encampments, you were active in the protests, and you also worked as a negotiator between protesters and university administrators, one of whom told the New Yorker that you stood out from other protesters for your levelheadedness, which I found very interesting.

What is the effect of trying to separate you from the rest of the pack as the “right” kind of protester”? How do you overcome that?

MK: That really enraged me that you have to be a perfect victim to be worthy of people’s sympathy, to be worthy of the rule of law. Because what we protested is a genocide. That’s what we protested, and that’s the right thing to do. It shouldn’t be criminalized. Unfortunately, we internalized that. 

I talk a little bit about how I myself would highlight the numbers of women and children just to appeal to more people that like, “Look, young women and children are being killed by Israel.” But what about the men? Because that’s the level of the dehumanization of Palestinians in this country, that it only took the Trump administration to mention my name as “Mahmoud Khalil” and Palestinian for people to paint a certain image of me.

But in reality, I’m a Palestinian who believes in a free Palestine, where everyone from the river to the sea deserves safety, dignity, and freedom.

Just like the fact that I had to be that perfect victim. Because I’m not perfect. No one is perfect. Palestinians are, you know —

AL: Human. 

MK: Humans, the same as any other, any other nation. We have our aspirations. We have our culture. We have our deficiencies. We’re not out of this planet. But yet the media insists on treating Palestinians on a different standard, when they ask me about condemning or not condemning all of that, I’m like, you’re not interested in my views about Hamas. 

If you’re interested about my views about Hamas, you would ask me what are my views about Hamas, or a different question. But they use that question as a litmus test: If you say yes, then maybe you are a human worthy of talking to. If not, then you are that villain that this administration is talking about. That’s why we refuse the premise of the question as a whole. It’s not about the question itself. The whole premise of the question we refuse. 

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I think it’s for Americans to reckon with why we are here, why we are treating Palestinian stories differently from any other story. Whether it’s the Zionist lobby that for tens of years has fed this hate, whether it’s the media itself or Hollywood or just the institutions themselves that fed that hate and fed the image of the Palestinian as violent, rather than just a human being.

Or recently just how, it’s not only the Trump administration. It’s before them, the Biden administration, before them, the Obama administration. It goes back to every administration this country had dehumanizing Palestinians. Because Trump wouldn’t have had the power to do what he did with me were it not for what Colombia portrayed or said about the movement, or the Biden administration as well. 

AL: And as we’ve written about a lot at The Intercept the beginning of this crackdown on campuses started under Biden.

MK: Absolutely.

AL: I want to deviate quickly just because you mentioned this question, and I had written a question that I wasn’t sure we would have time to get to about being asked about Hamas because this comes up in The New Yorker article, and I was curious what you thought of how — I don’t know if you read the latest one from last month.

MK: The profile?

AL: Yeah. Because I was curious about how it was framed, because he says that you push back on the framing of the question, right? He asked you about your views on Hamas and that you protested the premise of the question. And then it said what your explanation was. But I thought it was interesting to print your defense of why you reject the premise, but still print your answer to the question.

MK: To me, Hamas is a political faction that has a military wing that got most of its popularity because of the failures of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO, in bringing peace after the Oslo Accords, where a lot of Palestinians were excited about the prospects of peace.

But when they saw that Israel is undermining any prospects of a Palestinian state, a lot of Palestinians turned to Hamas as that resistance movement that may bring something.

And as I explain in my book, Palestinians supported Hamas not because of ideological reasons as much as because they wanted a way forward. For me, I’m against all Palestinian political factions because not one of them — whether it’s Hamas, Fatah, or PFLP — rose up to the aspirations of the Palestinian people, unfortunately.

That’s why I’m a strong believer in international law. I’m a strong believer in the fact that Palestinians have the right of self-determination, have the right to resist under international law, and have the right to really tell the world what they want. That’s what I want my answer about such a questions to be. 

AL: That’s not what people want to hear. 

MK: Yeah, exactly. They want just a yes or no, it’s a black and white.

I can’t tell people how to resist. That’s from being in the United States. For someone who’s going through bombardment, who’s going through checkpoints, whose house is being raided at night by the Israeli army, who the drones are above their heads all the time — I can’t, from here, tell them how to resist.

But for me, I’m a firm believer of international law, and that’s how I see the way forward. Again, I’m a Palestinian. I believe in a free Palestine, where everyone, from the river to the sea, have the right to live with dignity, with justice, with freedom, with equality. That’s what we’re asking for.

AL: This fight, when it comes down to it, is fundamentally over First Amendment rights for you and everyone in this country and the fight for freedom in Palestine.

A new report from Uncivil, a consortium of scholars and researchers, audited five years, going back to 2020, of publicly listed grants to 77 university centers, initiatives, and nonprofits doing “civility” work to promote pluralism and viewpoint diversity. The group found that almost all of the top funders, responsible for $82 million in grants, were groups and foundations deeply invested in conservative and/or “pro-Israel” networks. 

Unsurprisingly, these funders donated more to groups that mirrored and promoted their viewpoints over progressive groups by a ratio of more than 6 to 1. Just to underscore this point, the top five grantees who have received funding for “civility discourse” work include: Turning Point USA, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council — which does model bills for state legislatures — the Anti-Defamation League, and Project Veritas. This is essentially a list of the most right-wing groups in the country at the moment. The top groups. 

While many of those groups present this civility discourse as politically neutral, Uncivil found that 70 percent of the campuses they looked at had been accused of suppressing pro-Palestine speech. This is now roughly a $200-million-a-year industry. 

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In the book, you talk about how this movement at Columbia backfired: in trying to suspend or shut down pro-Palestine groups, it ended up creating a 100 or more new pro-Palestine groups.

But given how strong this “civility discourse” push still is, where do you see the student Palestine solidarity movement going from here? 

MK: The fact that the president of the United States felt the need to go after a random student means that this movement changed the mainstream, means that we are winning. Otherwise, they would leave it to, I would say, covert racism and discrimination because it was always happening at Columbia, as I’ve mentioned these attacks against Palestine. But it wasn’t very obvious. Because they did not need to.

I don’t think there’s an amount of money that would stop the Palestine movement for freedom, because we can see that people now feel betrayed by their institutions, feel betrayed by their representatives, feel betrayed by the establishment that hid from them the endless support to Israel.

Because now if you’re a politician who’s supporting Palestine, that means you’re also good on other things. Because a lot of people, Palestine may not be their single issue or their first. But if you’re good on Palestine, that means you are good on other things.

That means that you are not bought by corporations and by AIPAC and by the oligarchs. That’s how it came right now. That’s why in Zohran’s race —

AL: Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayor. 

MK: Tens of millions were spent against him, and Abdul El-Sayed, the Senate candidate, the Democratic candidate, also over $60 million were spent against him, and still he won [the primary]. But that doesn’t mean to me that we should stop. That means that we should continue until that dome breaks. And it will break. Sooner or later, it will break.

We need change. We need to stop sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, or any arms to Israel, or anything to Israel, really. Israel should be isolated, should be the pariah state that it is. That’s why I keep pushing now. I keep working on advocating for Palestine. That this did not stop. The genocide’s still happening. Every day there is a Palestinian getting killed by Israel, whether in Gaza or in the West Bank. 

But also we must acknowledge the violence that was inflicted upon students, upon this movement in this country. It’s not only universities that suspended and expelled these students, not only that the police also brutalized their students, but you have a big attack on this movement that’s happening across the country, whether from the federal government itself. But you can see across the country, whether it is in the South or even small counties also still trying to attack this movement.

My position as a Palestinian is, how can we really face this level of violence or this level of coordinated and well-funded attacks against the movement?

AL: Though the Trump administration has claimed repeatedly that your case is not about free speech or the First Amendment, they have not necessarily been arguing that your speech wasn’t constitutionally protected or that you are here illegally. Just to be clear, for anyone who’s confused, you are a green card holder, a lawful permanent resident. 

We’ve been talking about this New Yorker piece, as Andrew Marantz wrote last month. The government is arguing that none of those things — the legality of your actions, or your presence here — outweigh Trump’s power to detain you on whatever grounds it sees fit. In this case, claiming that your presence is a threat to American foreign policy interests.

You’ve talked about this fundamental contradiction in the American story of democracy and liberty, that the only real rights we have are those the government sees fit to enforce. You talk about the suspension of principles, depending on the circumstance. And this is a long-standing criticism of the American government, particularly if you’re a minority, a woman, a trans person, or if you’re poor.

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You’ve shared your unique perspective on this issue, having lived under a dictatorship in Syria under Bashar al-Assad. You have said at least in Syria, the government wasn’t telling you it was upholding your rights. [laughs] They were open about it. And since your abduction, we’re seeing the government be in many ways more open about its intentions here. But what happens after that? 

MK: It’s fascism. It is authoritarianism. What we’re seeing within my case or other cases is authoritarian practices. The government is trying their luck. For the government now, the worst thing that could happen is a court telling them, “No, maybe you shouldn’t do this.”

But for me, I lost 104 days of my life. For others, they lost their entire lives. I’m not an expert on authoritarianism or dictatorships, but I lived under dictatorship. As I said, in Syria, I hid my face because I knew the risks. It wasn’t Assad was going out and saying, “We have freedom of speech, and we have all of that.” It wasn’t like that. You knew the consequences.

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Here, they would gaslight you into “No, you have rights. You have all of this.” But you have rights because it’s convenient for them. As long as you’re not damaging or impacting the structures of power, you have freedom of speech, you have rule of law, the Constitution applies to you. But the moment that your speech or your actions threaten that structure of power, you would see the opposite — which is authoritarianism at the end of the day.

Trump is not hiding it. When they arrested me, they said, “This is a blueprint to go after everyone who’s speaking out for Palestine.” It’s not like they hid their intentions at all. 

Part of me, like years from now, America would look back on ICE detention, on Palestine, and say, why did we let this happen? And that’s part of my fight. That’s why I’m doing this right now, because we need to stop it now. We can’t afford to wait 20 years from now because people are being killed. People are being disappeared. 65,000 at any moment are in ICE detention separated from their families.

AL: Mahmoud, are there any final thoughts you would like to leave our listeners with?

MK: I wrote this book to raise the alarm that we can’t afford to stay silent. That in our backyards, there are ICE detention centers. In our backyards, there are weapon manufacturers who are shipping weapons to Israel to kill people. We must act now, and we can’t just afford to wait.

AL: Mahmoud Khalil, we’re gonna leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us on The Intercept Briefing.

MK: No, it’s my honor, Akela. Thank you so much.

AL: That does it for this episode. 

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST. That’s 530-763-2278.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Video editing by Sean Turner. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. And a special thank you to our recording engineer David Herman at Good Studio. Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post Mahmoud Khalil: “We Can’t Afford to Stay Silent” 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.

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.

Seeking to highlight ties between Columbia University and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the campus protest movement had culminated in a building occupation that ended with dozens of arrests, sparking activism on campuses across the country. At Columbia, classes went virtual or used a hybrid model.

On the day classes resumed their regular scheduling in September, one protester splattered the university’s famous Alma Mater statue in red paint.

Following the incident, New York Police Department investigators deployed an extensive array of high-tech surveillance and investigative tools to identify the alleged vandal, according to documents from the court case provided exclusively to The Intercept. Police leveraged networks of surveillance cameras and facial recognition software to pinpoint a suspect.

In July 2025, Jakhi Isaiah, a New Jersey-based activist whose legal last name is McCray, was charged for the incident.

As the nationwide protest movement against Israel’s genocide in Gaza became a national lightening rod and the Trump administration began to throw its weight against activists, authorities at all levels began to expend tremendous resources against pro-Palestine demonstrators. Using intensive surveillance tools in response to relatively minor crimes became typical in cases against pro-Palestine protesters.

“I think it deliberately sends a very chilling message that you better not dissent,” said Bina Ahmad, a civil rights and criminal defense attorney has represented pro-Palestine protesters but is not working on Isaiah’s case. “How many [resources] they used for such a small charge kind of says they will go to any length to grab who they want to grab and charge what they want to charge.”

The documents obtained by The Intercept also detail how NYPD investigators appeared to have abandoned the case, before being spurred to reopen it by federal officials. Both the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the U.S. Marshals Service, according to the documents, were participating in a separate federal investigation into Isaiah.

Facial Recognition

Columbia claimed that the paint protest had caused thousands of dollars in damage to the statue, but maintenance crews were able to clean it up almost immediately. Photographs taken by students show that, by the end of the day, all the paint had had been removed.

The hunt for the alleged vandal soon got underway.

In the days following the incident, NYPD detectives used 21 different camera angles and tracked the person that they allege is Isaiah as he moved both inside and out of Columbia’s campus.

“If you go around New York, there’s fucking cameras literally everywhere,” Isaiah told The Intercept. “That’s freaky as hell.”

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Investigators claim to have followed Isaiah’s movements using surveillance footage for more than two continuous hours surrounding the incident, tracking him even after he entered a university building and changed clothing. The person on video footage during the vandalism was masked and wore a hat. (Neither the NYPD nor Columbia responded to requests for comment.)

A camera eventually captured someone dressed in similar clothing with their mask removed while running down a nearby city street, according to the discovery documents. NYPD detectives then took the maskless image and used facial recognition tools to generate a hit on Isaiah.

Following the facial recognition ID, a probable cause to arrest notice was issued, meaning that officers Isaiah encountered would have discretion on whether or not to bring him into custody and charge him with the vandalism offenses.

Months later, Isaiah was arrested at an unrelated anti-ICE protest. Despite being in custody, he was not charged or arraigned on any offenses relating to the Columbia University incident, suggesting that the NYPD investigation against him had stalled.

Later, internal communications obtained by The Intercept revealed that while Columbia’s public safety department eventually asked the NYPD to terminate the investigation, they reversed course less than a day later, citing a “miscommunication” between university officials and the NYPD.

Newfound Attention

In June 2025, some 10 months after the paint incident, Isaiah received newfound attention from law enforcement. He was accused of being the perpetrator behind a multi-car arson carried out against NYPD vehicles at a Brooklyn precinct.

The NYPD investigation seemed to have languished, Isaiah said. Despite the police’s probable cause to arrest notice tied to his identity, Isiah said he had several run-ins with NYPD, including the ICE protest arrest, where officers stopped Isaiah, but opted not to charge him with any offenses related to the Columbia investigation.

After the federal investigation into Isaiah for arson, however, the NYPD detectives seemed to revive the case against him related to the Columbia vandalism.

Internal communications obtained by The Intercept from one week after the arson investigation began show NYPD detectives saying that “due to recent incident that occurred in the confines of the 83 Precinct involving wanted perpetrator, case has become federal and the federal authorities will continue to follow up.” Two wanted posters — one for the arson, and one for the vandalism — were attached to the email.

Following a weekslong manhunt by federal law enforcement related to the fires, Isaiah surrendered to police. (He has since pleaded guilty to one count of arson in federal court.) Following his detention by federal authorities, prosecutors in New York charged him in the Columbia paint incident.

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Federal cooperation with local law enforcement agencies has ramped up in the wake of the national protest movement against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, spurred in part by initiatives like Donald Trump’s National Security Memorandum-7 and his executive order that designated “antifa” as a domestic terror group. Highly politicized federal agencies are now more regularly working hand in glove with local police departments, who now have a mandate to pursue politicized cases, said Brendan McQuade, a criminologist at the University of Southern Maine.

“This is collaboration institutionalized,” said McQuade.

When Isaiah was finally arraigned for the Columbia paint charges, an NYPD report featured a list of 41 different “associates” — people police suspected to be contacts or who he’d been arrested alongside at protests. Isaiah believes the list is part of a wider pattern of repression and investigation of pro-Palestine protesters. He wonders whether if he had not turned himself in, the list may have been used against people in his community.

“It’s just very obvious network mapping,” he said. “If they hadn’t found me, they probably would have kept going through that list.”

Isaiah is expected to stand trial for three vandalism and graffiti-related charges in August but says that he sees his case as emblematic of larger trends in American society.

“The repression on the movement, the surveillance on the movement is often just a microcosm of the larger repression of communities as a whole,” he said.

He nonetheless remains hopeful: “Communities are still finding a way to prosper and live their lives, despite this intense level of omnipresence.”

The post NYPD Used High-Tech Surveillance to Find Gaza Paint Splatter Protester, Docs Show 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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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.

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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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.

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.

“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.

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.

Days after pressuring pop singer Ed Sheeran to drop rapper Macklemore from his tour over the latter’s “Free Palestine” remarks, Kraft claimed in a statement posted to social media that “for decades” he has “supported efforts that create opportunity for Palestinians,” such as initiatives to “to build businesses, create jobs, and forge relationships” between Israelis and Palestinians. The claims were made as a part of Kraft’s pledge to give $2 million to “aid in the region.” 

Kraft did not disclose which organizations would receive his money.

Nor did he mention his long history of donating to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, an organization that collects money on behalf of Israeli soldiers, and the United Democracy Project, the super PAC of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which lobbies to tilt American politics in favor of Israel. Kraft has also given money to a host of pro-Israel advocacy groups that attack critics of Israel, spread content that critics warn is Islamophobic, and have steadfastly defended Israel against mounting evidence of its ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

The Intercept’s analysis of tax forms since 2006 show that Kraft’s charity group, the Kraft Family Foundation, has donated $196,000 to the Friends of the IDF and an additional $123,000 to other organizations — Brothers for Life and Friends of Israel Disabled Veterans — that directly benefit Israeli military soldiers. In his seven separate donations to the Friends of the IDF, Kraft earmarked the money to “Promote education for young Jewish soldiers.”

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Since 2020, Friends of the IDF has poured more than $20 million into its lone soldier program, which supports young Jewish Americans, and Israelis who have no familial support, to serve in the Israeli military’s reserve soldier program, according to an investigation by The Intercept. The program has continued throughout Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

Kraft has organized trips to Israel for former and current NFL players, including a 2017 trip in which he led a delegation of former players on a visit to an Israeli Air Force base, organized by the Friends of the IDF.  

In 2019, Kraft gave $20 million to found a new organization, the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, now known as the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate. Upon its founding, Kraft pledged the organization would oppose the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, claiming the Palestinian rights movement “and other efforts to delegitimize and undermine the State of Israel are the most disconcerting times for the country I love so much.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reciprocated the love when Kraft announced the new group while accepting an award for his Israel advocacy, declaring, “Israel does not have a more loyal friend than Robert Kraft.”

Over the years, Kraft’s foundation has also given $63,500 to the right-wing media watchdog group Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA, which has run pressure campaigns against news outlets, journalists, students, and scholars it deems anti-Israel and has routinely denied Israel’s genocide in Gaza, dismissing such evidence as “the Gaza GenoLie.” When Kraft gave $36,000 to CAMERA in 2018, the donation included a memo, “fighting antisemitism.”

In 2011 and 2012, Kraft’s foundation donated $50,000 to boost the Investigative Project on Terrorism, which the Council on American-Islamic Relations considers a core part of what it refers to as the “U.S. Islamophobia Network.” As Kraft gave to the think tank, it launched campaigns targeting U.S.-based groups decrying Israel’s human rights violations against Palestinians, such as attacking human rights groups Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine as having ties to “extremist groups” and claiming they were a part of a “web of Hamas support.” The group has more recently dismissed protests against Israel’s genocide as Hamas propaganda. 

In addition, Kraft’s foundation donated $150,000 from 2008 to 2018 to the pro-Israel organization, Middle East Media Research Institute, co-founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer and counterrorism adviser to several Israeli presidents. The group’s website says it exists to “bridge the language gap between the West and the Middle East and South Asia” by translating Arab language media into English. However, journalists and experts have noted selective translations of Arab articles and statements to misrepresent policies of Arab governments as extremist or violent.

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Aside from his donations to nonprofit groups, Kraft has been an active donor to AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project. Through his limited liability company, the Kraft Group, Kraft has given $3 million to the super PAC since its founding in 2022, including $1 million in donations this midterm cycle. During this midterm election cycle, AIPAC has flooded races to oppose candidates who criticize Israel’s genocide in Gaza and U.S. military support for Israel, helping make several primaries among the most expensive on record. 

It’s not clear whether these entities were the ones Kraft claims have created jobs and spurred dialogues between Palestinians and Israelis. Kraft, however, is also a regular donor to local Jewish groups in Massachusetts, such as Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston; Temple Emanuel in Newton; and Jewish Family & Children’s Services in Waltham.  

Kraft and the groups mentioned in this story did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

The post Robert Kraft Claims His Donations Help Palestinians. Turns Out He’s Funding Friends of the IDF. 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aghayeva’s Arrest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Words Versus Actions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Double Standards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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