Pro-Palestinian Campus Protests (2023- )

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      A Columbia Activist Sought Middle Ground on Gaza. The U.S. Detained Him.

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      Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested at a citizenship interview in Vermont. He had spent a decade trying to understand the conflict that shaped his life, his supporters say.As Columbia University’s student protest movement careened toward the center of the nation’s political discourse last year, one of its most ardent leaders suddenly fell quiet.Mohsen Mahdawi had been a key organizer of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, but he said he walked away from that role in March 2024 — well before the rallies reached a fever pitch as students set up encampments and broke into a campus building.A fissure had been growing. By the fall of 2024 it had widened: Parts of the movement were becoming more radical, and some students were distributing fliers during a campus demonstration glorifying violent resistance. Mr. Mahdawi, meanwhile, was approaching Israeli students, hoping to find middle ground in the divisive Israeli-Palestinian conflict that, for decades, had unleashed horrors on both sides and in his own life.He told friends that he was being sidelined in part because he wanted to engage in dialogue with supporters of Israel, a stance many pro-Palestinian activists reject.His calls for compassion did not protect him from President Trump’s widening dragnet against pro-Palestinian student organizers on campus.At an appointment to obtain U.S. citizenship on Monday in Vermont, Mr. Mahdawi, who is expected to graduate next month from Columbia, was taken into custody by immigration police.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Inside Trump’s Pressure Campaign on Universities

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      As he finished lunch in the private dining room outside the Oval Office on April 1, President Trump floated an astounding proposal: What if the government simply canceled every dollar of the nearly $9 billion promised to Harvard University?The administration’s campaign to expunge “woke” ideology from college campuses had already forced Columbia University to strike a deal. Now, the White House was eyeing the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university.“What if we never pay them?” Mr. Trump casually asked, according to a person familiar with the conversation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussion. “Wouldn’t that be cool?”The moment underscored the aggressive, ad hoc approach continuing to shape one of the new administration’s most consequential policies.Mr. Trump and his top aides are exerting control of huge sums of federal research money to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which they see as hostile to conservatives and intent on perpetuating liberalism.Their effort was energized by the campus protests against Israel’s response to the October 2023 terrorist attack by Hamas, demonstrations during which Jewish students were sometimes harassed. Soon after taking office, Mr. Trump opened the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, which is scrutinizing leading universities for potential civil rights violations and serving as an entry point to pressure schools to reassess their policies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stanford Protesters Charged With Felonies for Pro-Palestinian Occupation

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      Prosecutors filed felony charges on Thursday against 12 protesters, nearly all with ties to Stanford University, for breaking into an administration building and occupying it in 2024.Prosecutors on Thursday filed felony charges against 12 pro-Palestinian protesters — all but one of them a current or former student at Stanford University — for breaking into administration offices in June and causing extensive damage.The charges were among the most severe levied against participants in last year’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses. More than 3,000 people were arrested at college protests and encampments in the spring of 2024, but they generally faced misdemeanor charges or saw their charges dropped.Jeff Rosen, the district attorney for Santa Clara County, which includes the Stanford campus, charged the 12 protesters with felony vandalism and felony conspiracy to trespass. They face up to three years and eight months in prison, as well as the payment of restitution to reimburse the university for the damage.Stanford is one of dozens of schools being investigated by the Trump administration for how they have handled pro-Palestinian protests and whether they have done enough to combat antisemitism on campus. The administration has also revoked the visas of several Stanford students and recent graduates, though the reason is unclear. .Mr. Rosen said that President Trump’s intense focus on Stanford and other universities played no role in the decision to charge the crimes as felonies.“What the federal administration is doing is what they’re doing. What I’m doing is applying the California Penal Code,” Mr. Rosen said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Senate Panel Demands Information About Gaza Protest Group at Columbia

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      Lawmakers want the university to turn over all its records about Students for Justice in Palestine. At Northwestern University, two professors sued over a separate request.A Senate committee asked Columbia University to provide extensive information about Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that had been at the center of protests on campus over Israel and Gaza.Information sought by the committee, including “all records in the university’s possession related to SJP and its on-campus activities,” was requested by Wednesday in a letter signed by Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican of Louisiana and the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.After a judge directed the university late Wednesday to say what materials it intended to disclose and to wait to produce them until Friday, the school acknowledged that order and said it planned to turn over “policies and guidance,” but that it would not identify individual students.The Senate committee’s demand was disclosed in a court filing this week connected to a lawsuit filed by seven anonymous students at Columbia and Barnard, its affiliated women’s college, along with Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia student whom the Trump administration is trying to deport.The suit had asked a judge to bar school officials from handing over confidential disciplinary records to lawmakers. On Wednesday, two clinical professors of law at Northwestern University in Illinois filed a similar suit.Republican lawmakers have said they are investigating an epidemic of antisemitism within higher education, but critics have said the Trump administration and its allies are conducting a broad crackdown on political speech.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Administration Sends Harvard a List of Demands to Protect Federal Funds

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      The Trump administration sent Harvard a list of demands on Thursday that would have to be met to end a government review of $9 billion the school receives in federal funding.The government announced the review earlier this week, which threatened to cancel all or some of the money as part of its campaign against what it views as unchecked antisemitism on campuses.The conditions largely follow the playbook the Trump administration used to force Columbia University to comply with its demands last month, after canceling $400 million of that school’s federal grants and contracts. In both instances, the government asked Harvard and Columbia to impose bans, with few exemptions, on masking.Pro-Palestinian students often used masks during protests against the war in Gaza to obscure their identities after many said they were harassed online when their personal information was revealed.The Trump administration also pressured the universities to intensify efforts to hold student groups “accountable,” cease admissions practices based on race, color or national origin and revamp policies on campus protests.Harvard would also be required to “commit to full cooperation” with the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that enforces immigration policies, including deportations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Columbia Campus Occupation Could Have Ended Without Police, Report Says

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      A university senate review concludes that some demonstrators who occupied Hamilton Hall were willing to leave voluntarily.Columbia University’s move to use police force to clear demonstrators from a campus building last spring could potentially have been avoided, as some students were urgently asking if they could leave voluntarily, according to a report released Tuesday by the university’s senate.The students, who early that morning had broken into Hamilton Hall and barricaded the doors, told faculty intermediaries that they had enlisted the help of a Harlem pastor to help them depart safely. But university administrators, saying time had run out, allowed hundreds of police officers to come onto the campus to remove protesters from the building.The new details of the final hours of the occupation of Hamilton Hall on April 30 were among the key revelations of the 335-page report, which was written by a group within the senate, a Columbia policymaking body that includes faculty members, students and administrators, with faculty in the majority. The senate is independent from the administration and has been critical of its protest response.Called the “The Sundial Report,” it provides a play-by-play chronology of the events surrounding the protests on campus related to the war in Gaza beginning in October 2023.The demonstrations and Columbia’s response put the school at the center of a national debate over how to protect students from harassment by demonstrators while also protecting the free speech and rights of protesters.The events of last spring resulted in significant disruption on the university’s Morningside Heights campus, and some critics of Columbia’s response said administrators waited too long to take action. The unrest culminated on April 30, when a smaller group of protesters — including some who were unaffiliated with Columbia — broke off from a tent encampment and took over Hamilton Hall.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Use of Immigration Law Appears to Conflict With Limits Imposed by Congress

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      A crackdown targeting foreign students protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians conflicts with free-speech protections that lawmakers added in 1990.The Trump administration is asserting that it has broad power under a 1952 law to kick out foreign students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. That statute says the secretary of state can deem noncitizens deportable for foreign policy reasons, and the secretary, Marco Rubio, made clear recently that he had already used it to cancel hundreds of student visas.“It might be more than 300 at this point,” Mr. Rubio said last week. “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”But that expansive conception of power appears to conflict with a key limit Congress added nearly four decades after the law passed. Lawmakers explained that the modification, which is recorded elsewhere in federal statute books, means the law may be used “only in unusual circumstances” and “sparingly” if the problem stems from foreigners’ exercise of free speech.Lawmakers also gave two examples of when deporting someone under the 1952 law over speech would still be legitimate. Both scenarios, laid out in a report explaining the 1990 bill that enacted the restriction, were highly exceptional.The first was if a particular foreigner’s mere presence in the United States would somehow violate a treaty. The other was if it “could result in imminent harm to the lives or property” of Americans abroad, like when allowing the former shah of Iran to come to the United States in 1979 led to a riot at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and a hostage crisis.The additional guardrails raise questions over what rights foreign students are entitled to and underscore the Trump administration’s far-ranging interpretation of its authority in aggressively moving to deport those who have protested Israel’s war in Gaza. The executive branch has broad discretion to deny visas to applicants while they are abroad. But once noncitizens are on American soil, they are protected by the Constitution, which includes the rights to free speech and due process.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What We Know About the Detentions of Student Protesters

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      The Trump administration is looking to deport pro-Palestinian students who are legally in the United States, citing national security. Critics say that violates free speech protections.Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the State Department under his direction had revoked the visas of more than 300 people and was continuing to revoke visas daily.Pool photo by Nathan HowardThe Trump administration is trying to deport pro-Palestinian students and academics who are legally in the United States, a new front in its clash with elite schools over what it says is their failure to combat antisemitism.The White House asserts that these moves — many of which involve immigrants with visas and green cards — are necessary because those taken into custody threaten national security. But some legal experts say that the administration is trampling on free speech rights and using lower-level laws to crack down on activism.Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday that the State Department under his direction had revoked the visas of more than 300 people and was continuing to revoke visas daily. He did not specify how many of those people had taken part in campus protests or acted to support Palestinians.Mr. Rubio gave that number at a news conference, after noting that the department had revoked the visa of a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University. He did not give details on the other revocations.Immigration officials are known to have pursued at least nine people in apparent connection to this effort since the start of March.The detentions and efforts to deport people who are in the country legally reflect an escalation of the administration’s efforts to restrict immigration, as it also seeks to deport undocumented immigrants en masse.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More