Arrests at pro-Palestinian protests that expanded Thursday to colleges across the country brought the total number of people detained in a week of demonstrations to more than 500, with officials struggling to quell the unrest by clearing encampments and closing buildings.
A tumultuous scene and dozens of arrests late Wednesday at the University of Southern California pushed its administration to cancel the school’s main commencement ceremony May 10, citing new safety measures that have been put in place after protests there.
Since April 18, police have detained demonstrators at schools including Emerson College in Boston, New York University, the University of Texas at Austin and Ohio State University. But even as law enforcement has moved in, students — many demanding that their institutions cut ties with corporations doing business with Israel — have gathered on campuses, defying exhortations and threats by administrators and calls for crackdowns by politicians.
Those students on Thursday showed little appetite for folding up their tents and signs as the academic year comes to a close. In some places, the police action drew recruits to their cause.
In one of the most dramatic clashes, police officers in Atlanta disrupted an encampment at Emory University and faced off with demonstrators while attempting to clear the area. An officer deployed a stun gun at a protester who was being restrained, according to social media video examined by The Washington Post.
The Atlanta Police Department said officers used chemical irritants but denied using rubber bullets in making arrests. Social media videos appeared to show officers pinning one person to the ground amid screams. In a statement, the department claimed that its officers “were met with violence” after the crowd refused to disperse.
(Video: Jareer Imran for The Washington Post)
Emory police took “a couple of dozen” people into custody, but university spokeswoman Laura Diamond said Thursday afternoon that she was unable to provide an exact number or say whether any charges were filed. She said that the first protesters were not students, though some students joined them later, and that the group ignored warnings from campus police to leave — at which point the Atlanta police and Georgia State Police were deployed to assist.
Diamond did not respond to questions about tactics used by those officers.
Jareer Imran, a 21-year-old senior at Emory, said he heard what sounded like gunshots while in class. When he arrived at the encampment, he said he saw 50 to 60 officers facing off with hundreds of protesters, many of them coughing from what they told him was gas sprayed by police.
A video he took shows agitated students chanting, “Let them go!” as police escort two students away.
At Emerson, Boston police moved to break up a protest outside the State Transportation Building early Thursday, moving in on students who formed a human wall and raised umbrellas, according to footage from the scene. A total of 108 arrests were made, and four officers were injured, according to a Boston Police Department spokesman who said there were no reports of injuries among the protesters in custody.
Willow Torres, a 20-year-old junior who had attended protests nightly since Sunday, was among those arrested. She said she saw police enclose a crowd of demonstrators in an alley and soon felt an officer grab the back of her sweatshirt, push her to the ground and zip-tie her hands behind her back. “I was tossed around,” Torres said, describing it as “incredibly violent.” She was released from jail at 7 a.m. She plans to avoid nighttime protests from now on.
Emerson President Jay Bernhardt expressed regret for the police actions, noting in a statement that school officials were at police precincts and courthouses with arrested students and that the students would return to campus after their release. The college “recognizes and respects the civic activism and passion that sparked the protest,” Bernhardt said.
At Ohio State University, police moved again to break up a protest Thursday night. University spokesperson Ben Johnson said protesters who refused to leave were arrested and charged with criminal protest.
Police move in on pro-Palestinian protesters at Emerson College attempting to form a human wall outside the State Transportation Building in Boston. (Video: Storyful)
In some places, peaceful scenes of protest played out even with law enforcement presence. At Northeastern University, also in Boston, dozens of students linked arms around a couple of tents set up shortly after sunrise. As the circle grew, so did the presence of university police.
Hours later, a handful of Jewish students — some wearing kippah, and one wearing an Israeli flag as a cape — calmly debated with members of the protest movement. “In Gaza, if there wasn’t a wall, people would come in and kill people, right?” one student asked. A pro-Palestinian student disagreed with the premise. “But that’s a hypothetical, right?” he replied. “Just because a group does something wrong shouldn’t mean you wall everyone in.”
Both sides in the discussion then looked up. Boston police officers, wearing helmets and holding zip ties, started to surround protesters. About 10 minutes later, after campus administrators asked for the IDs of the everyone in the circle, those officers left and were replaced by campus police.
And at Columbia University, where the week of protests and arrests of more than 100 people were the inspiration for copycat protests and encampments nationwide, the once-fiery momentum was mellowing into a sense of mere inertia. The encampment on the school’s main mall Thursday was both more crowded and less noisy. Yet as the administration’s deadline for a negotiated resolution entered its final 24 hours, students did not approach the ticking clock with now-or-never urgency.
When an initial midnight deadline came this week, students there were braced given rumors that the National Guard would descend on campus. But the midnight deadline became an 8 a.m. deadline — and then an unspecified deadline that by Thursday afternoon was in its foggy final hours.
Mariam Jallow, a junior majoring in history who is next school year’s student body president, acknowledged the change in atmosphere.
“The student body is coming to terms with the fact that demands will not be met,” Jallow, 21, said Thursday afternoon. “Part of it feels like defeat, but a lot of it is pride in what we’ve done and how we’ve changed the conversation — not just within Columbia, but around the country.”
She hopes the activism will start up again next year. “We came to college not exactly with this experience in mind, but definitely expecting difficult conversations and difficult growth. I came here for an education, and I’ve gotten a great one in the last few weeks.”
In an email to students sent late Thursday from the office of Columbia President Minouche Shafik, which was seen by The Post, the university said the talks with protesters “have shown progress and are continuing as planned.”
Elsewhere, though, students said their enthusiasm for protest was far from waning — and, in some cases, just beginning.
Students in orange vests monitored the perimeter of a small pro-Palestinian tent camp at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. A couple of police officers stood chatting farther back in the courtyard, and a small number of pro-Israel students stood nearby.
The protesters’ aim is to push the university to divest from companies that support Israel. But they also want charges be dropped for dozens of students who were arrested at a pro-Palestinian rally in November — part of a university response that organizers say has been harsher than toward racial justice or environmental activism.
Ember McCoy, an environmental policy doctoral student, noted that the university recently divested based on climate issues and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Protesters will camp out until divestment happens, she said, no matter the school calendar. “I think it’s attainable, because they’ve done it in the past,” McCoy said. “So why not now?”
At a calm midday rally at the University of Texas at Austin, where officers had arrested 57 people the day before, many pro-Palestinian protesters said they either returned or showed up for the first time because they were outraged by what they viewed as a crackdown on free speech.
“It was almost tyrannical, what happened yesterday,” said Ryan Campbell, a geology major from a conservative Catholic family in the Houston suburbs. He said he had not taken a stand on the war in Gaza before Thursday. “I felt very comfortable at this university, and that all changed yesterday.”
Standing nearby, biology major Isaac Howard nodded. “No matter where you stand on this issue, pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, this should be really concerning because this is the state saying, ‘We don’t care about constitutional rights,’” he said.
Pro-Palestinian protests have rocked dozens of universities in the past week, from Yale University to California State Polytechnic at Humboldt, as students and sometimes faculty rally against the Israel-Gaza war.
Since the war began, at least 34,305 people have been killed and 77,293 injured in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which says the majority of the dead are women and children. Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed in the Oct. 7 attacks by the militant group Hamas.
Though the spring semester is drawing to a close, the encampments continue to spring up. More than a dozen student activists began setting up one at Northwestern University early Thursday; more than 60 students began a sit-in at Princeton University; and students at the University of Delaware held firm during the second day of a “die-in,” according to campus newspapers. About 30 tents filled one corner of George Washington University’s central lawn Thursday morning.
At USC, officers had struggled with protesters while seeking to break up a demonstration Wednesday night. Los Angeles police said that 93 people were arrested, with no reports of injuries, and that the protesters later dispersed. The campus was open only to students and staff Thursday.
Across town at UCLA, a student encampment was ringed Thursday with signs. “UCLA Says Free Palestine,” one read. The atmosphere was calm.
Visitors had to check in at a table and were told there were no bananas for allergy reasons, no drugs and no weapons. Everyone was asked to wear masks. “If you’re in this space, you have to cover your face,” a woman passing out masks said.
Political science professor Michael Chwe stood on the steps of Royce Hall holding a banner that read: “UCLA Faculty and Staff Stand With Our Students.”
He said he didn’t want what happened at USC to happen at UCLA. Faculty members “strongly believe that we need to protect the right of students on campuses,” he said. “So many great things have come out of students’ protests at the University of California, and it’s an important part of our democracy.”
Justine McDaniel and Emily Davis in Washington; Molly Hennessy-Fiske in Austin; Trevor Bach in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Yvonne Condes in Los Angeles and Frances Vinall in Seoul contributed to this report.
correction
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Boston Police Department Sgt. Detective John Boyle said there were no reports of injuries among protesters at Emerson College. Boyle said there were no reports of injuries among the protesters who were in custody. The article has been corrected.
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