Between classes, when throngs of students stream into and out of Columbia University’s campus, the security lines can back up like a TSA checkpoint. There’s a switch-back path of metal fencing that leads into a white tent, where two sets of guards check and then swipe campus ID cards before letting students in and out.
Inside, the campus is largely unchanged from when I was there as a graduate student a decade ago. All signs of last year’s protest encampments, which sparked a nationwide student movement in solidarity with the people of Palestine, have been wiped away. Protests sprang up on Columbia’s campus almost immediately after the beginning of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which has killed over 48,000 Palestinians since it began in October of 2023, after an attack by the militant wing of Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 251 more on Oct. 7.
Columbia’s protest movement was among the largest in the country, and its tactics captured headlines both for their boldness and the ferocity that authorities met them with. University administrators and local and federal law enforcement have handed down hundreds of arrests and disciplinary cases, suspending and in some cases expelling students affiliated with the movement. And earlier this month, the multi-faceted crackdown on dissent reached a new level, when one of the movement’s most visible leaders, Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested inside his university-provided apartment. Khalil’s arrest, activists tell me, puts the future of dissent and free speech at one of the nation’s most famous universities on a razor’s edge, as students contend with new repercussions — not just from their academic administrators, but from President Donald Trump himself.
On March 8, agents from U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia’s prestigious School of International Public Affairs. Khalil, a Palestinian born in a refugee camp in Syria, had played a key role in organizing the original encampments at Columbia and had served repeatedly as a negotiator between protesters and the university administration. ICE agents arrested Khalil inside of his university housing, with his pregnant wife, a U.S. citizen, present. Khalil is not a U.S. citizen, but is a legal permanent resident with a green card.
In the days since his arrest, protests have erupted across New York City and in Washington D.C., spurred by the Trump administration’s explicit posts vowing to deport Khalil for his activism. Khalil has not been accused of any crime, and the Trump administration has provided only an extremely flimsy justification for his arrest: that his presence in the U.S. could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
While the protests across New York have been raucous, loud, and heavily attended, activism on Columbia’s campus is being choked out by a university administration that has made it very clear they will not protect their students from prosecution by a hostile government.
“The university and the city have shown that they will immediately bow to Trump,” says Marie Adele Grosso, a third-year student at Barnard College and organizer with the Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition. “They have proven time after time that they will put their trustees, donors, and powerful alumni above student safety and student health.”
On Tuesday afternoon, I went to Columbia ahead of a planned walkout from classes to protest Khalil’s arrest. When I arrived, I found a group of around 50 students sitting or standing on the steps around Columbia’s Alma Mater statue in front of the Low Memorial Library. Students were still filtering in, many draped in white and black keffiyehs — but were not permitted to join the demonstration, which had been cordoned off by more metal fencing. Columbia security personnel manned entrances to the steps, letting protesters who were already inside come and go, but not permitting other passerby from joining the protest, forcing close to a hundred students to sit in a row against the fence while a crowd of a few dozen watched.
It was an awkward, stilted affair — defiant, but far from the dramatic actions and long-lasting encampments last year.
Outside the fencing, a student wearing a white polo shirt with an Israeli flag printed on its sleeve poked around the crowd, taking photos of protesters and texting furiously on his phone, occasionally laughing with a few other students. He was shadowed by several keffiyeh’d protesters with orange armbands, who told me they were working as security for the event. Other protesters in armbands stood at the entrances to the closed-off area, shadowing their counterparts in campus security.
These measures are a response to some of the ugliest moments of the protest and counter-protest movements on Columbia’s campus. In January of last year, a number of protesters were sprayed with a noxious chemical compound by an Israeli student. The student was suspended, but later sued the university and won a $395,000 settlement over their suspension.
“It’s important for people to realize that the various elements that we’re talking about work together as a whole,” Jamil, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement and PhD student at Columbia, tells me. Jamil says that Zionist organizations on campus regularly seek to weaponize the university’s disciplinary system against protesters, and claims that protesters are often harassed by counter-protesters spewing racist and violent insults, seeking to provoke a response.
Grosso, the third-year Barnard College student, says that the arm-banded “security” activists are there to watch for these provocateurs, or outright threats like the chemical-spraying student. “Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe!” protesters chanted on the steps of the library.
Jamil, like many activists on campus, requested to use a pseudonym for this story, fearing repercussions from the university. Those fears are not unfounded. In March, The Columbia Daily Spectator, the university’s student newspaper, reported that a network of current students and powerful alumni donors were collaborating to dox, or identify, protesters at campus events and push for their expulsion from the university using a private WhatsApp group that included several university faculty.
Some Columbia alumni and supporters last year pledged to withhold donations in order to exert pressure on the university administration, in response to the perceived antisemitism of the protests. New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, for instance, said last spring that he was “deeply saddened at the virulent hate that continues to grow on campus and throughout our country,” adding that he was “not comfortable supporting the university until corrective action is taken.”
The nascent second Trump administration has quickly piled on, cancelling $400 million in federal funding to the university, including $250 million in National Institutes of Health grants that fund medical research on campus. On Thursday night, officials from the Trump administration’s Department of Education, General Services Administration, and Department of Health and Human Services sent a list of demands to interim president Katrina Armstrong and the Columbia Board of Trustees indicating that they would continue to hold funding hostage until the demands were met. The list included that all students involved in the Hamilton Hall occupation face “expulsion or multi-year suspensions,” and that the university immediately place its Middle East, South Asian, and African studies department on academic receivership for five years, indicating that it wanted the university to take over direct administrative oversight of the department’s teachings. Grosso, the Barnard student, said these demands were “completely unreasonable, and said that the policies the Trump administration was asking for would “put every student in danger.”
The university has not yet said how it will proceed. But thus far, Columbia’s administration has repeatedly ruled against pro-Palestinian protesters. Earlier this month, the university expelled several protesters it accused of disrupting a class at Barnard College. Many protesters in the original encampment protests in April of last year were suspended. Earlier on Thursday, the university announced that it had concluded disciplinary proceedings for many of the participants of early actions in the encampment protests, including the occupation of the university’s Hamilton Hall on April 30, 2024, which provoked a massive NYPD response and over 300 arrests. The school said it had “issued sanctions to students ranging from multi-year suspensions, temporary degree revocations, and expulsions.”
“There is no limit to the willingness of U.S. universities to repress the Palestine movement on their campuses,” Jamil says.
Jamil says that Khalil’s arrest has inspired a sense of disgust among protesters, and not any increase in fear. Other students, however, are not shy about admitting how scared they are that they could be next.
“Every organizer I know at Barnard specifically has had the conversation: Are we willing to lose our education? Are we willing to lose our housing?” Grosso says.
For international students, the risks are even higher. Renee, an organizer with the Student Workers of Columbia, the university’s graduate student union, says that many grad students have stopped coming to campus and moved their classes online since Khalil’s arrest, fearing ICE agents who may be present on campus.
“Everyone in general is so scared to talk,” says Renee. “The university administration has been just so brutal and draconian, it’s really clear whose side they’re on.”
That fear, Grosso says, has come to dominate almost every aspect of activists’ education at Columbia, even before Khalil’s arrest. Grosso says that many students are now afraid to speak about controversial topics in their own classes, out of fear that their peers or other students with ties to Zionist organizations will leak their statements to the press, dox them, or push for them to face disciplinary action.
Grosso alleges that she has personally been the victim of numerous doxing attempts and rampant sexual harassment by Zionist supporters both on and off campus. Meanwhile, Grosso says there are around 60 current Columbia students who have served or are currently serving in the Israeli military, who face none of the same scrutiny as campus activists.
On Wednesday, Columbia announced that it had adopted a new “Anti-Doxxing and Online Harassment Policy,” which prohibits students, faculty, and staff from conduct such as: “harassing messages, threats, or insults; impersonation for malicious purposes; publicly sharing personal or private information; and encouraging harassment of others.” The policy, however, states that it does not apply retroactively, and activists say that they have lost faith in any kind of justice from the university administration.
“We’ve given up on reporting it,” Grosso says. “It’s clear that they won’t help us, and sometimes they’ll use our reports against us.”
There is a sense, among activists on campus, that there is almost no option for justice within the university administration. Students from multiple departments across the school shared similar experiences of silencing, paranoia, and discrimination as a result of their support for the Palestinian cause. As the protest on the library steps continued, I chatted with a group of Columbia Law School students who were hovering around the edges of the crowd. They were there to support the protesters, and didn’t want to give their names — aside from one, who said I could call him Hunter. “I already lost my job over this,” he says, “so who cares.”
Khalil’s arrest has had a “chilling effect” on campus, one student tells me, but in other ways has had the opposite effect: The campus is more engaged in the protest movement than it has been in months.
What happens next, Renee, the grad student organizer, says, is “the existential question of the past several days.”
“I really buy into the thought that we have movements of revolution and moments of reform,” says Renee. “In the moment where things are popping off, you have to show up for them and if you don’t that will make those quiet moments harder.”
The student union, she says, is about to start bargaining on a new contract with the administration — which organizers believe could put tangible gains, like new commitments to academic freedom — on the table.
“Making the leap from the crisis to the boring structural thing like the contract is really difficult,” Renee says. “It takes a lot of time and conversations — conversations that people can’t have if they’re afraid to have them.”
As I left campus, I watched an NYPD drone unit packing their aircraft away into an unmarked squad car. They’d been flying it above campus throughout the day, watching the small protest on the steps of the library. It had, apparently, stayed between the lines. There were no arrests.
For one afternoon, at least, a small group of students had been able to use their voices: within a cordon of metal fencing, flanked by security, and watched over by hostile groups both in the government and their own student body. At any time, they know now, even that small freedom can be taken away.
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