‘Campus turned into police state': inside the Columbia university protests

The Guardian

29-03-2025

On 8 March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University, as he was returning from dinner with his wife in New York. The agents said the state department had revoked his student visa and green card, though he had never been accused of, let alone convicted for, a crime. He was held in detention in New Jersey, then transferred to Louisiana. He has still not been accused a crime.
Nevertheless, Donald Trump's state department, headed by Marco Rubio, seeks to deport him under a provision of federal law that gives him the power to deport someone if their presence in the country is deemed to 'have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States'. Khalil's crime? He was a lead organizer of Columbia's protests for Palestinian rights.
'Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here,' Khalil, a Palestinian raised in exile in a Syrian refugee camp, wrote in a letter proclaiming his status as a 'political prisoner'. He is the one of the most prominent targets of a chilling federal crackdown over pro-Palestinian advocacy in the US, particularly on college campuses. And he is one of the most forceful voices in The Encampments, a new documentary on the campus movement for Palestine that has drawn ire from across the US political spectrum, in particular the right.
A certain characterization prevails in American mainstream media of the nationwide campus protests in 2024 against Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza: that the pro-Palestinian protesters were violent, deranged, self-righteous, naive and antisemitic. That they peddled 'radical, extreme ideology', in the words of the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, and that they were 'disgusting cesspools of antisemitic hate, full of pro-Hamas sympathizers, fanatics and freaks', according to Josh Hawley, a senator from Missouri.
The Encampments, directed by Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman and distributed by the Palestinian-founded company Watermelon Pictures, puts that narrative in stark relief. Charges of terrorism, brainwashing and violence from sources as ideologically divergent as Fox News and MSNBC overlay footage of students pitching tents, sitting together, playing music, chanting in communion and holding religious observances. 'The mood was so the opposite of what was being said on TV,' said Pritsker, who embedded in Columbia University's 120-tent campus encampment in April 2024. 'It was so funny to open your phone up and watch some guy in Washington DC say that there's this den of antisemitism at Columbia's campus, and you're watching a Passover Seder happen like 10 feet in front of you.'
The Encampments focuses in particular on Columbia, the focal point of national media interest over the protests and the inspiration for similar pro-Palestinian encampments at universities around the globe. The Ivy League university has a storied history of activism, dating back through the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It also has an undisclosed portion of its nearly $14bn endowment invested in companies in business with the Israeli military, which has killed 50,000 Palestinians and displaced 140,000 more since the 7 October 2023 Hamas terrorist attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and took 251 more hostage. The students' demand was straightforward: 'We don't want our money to go towards Palestinian death,' says organizer and negotiator Sueda Polat in the film.
The Encampments, which counts the rapper Macklemore among its executive producers, begins with the occupation of the green on 17 April 2024 – an escalation, as Khalil, Polat and organizer Grant Miner explain, only after the university changed its protest bylaws and refused to acknowledge smaller-scale interruptions. The film interweaves footage of the largely mundane, calm passing of the hours at the encampment with the destruction of Gaza – bombed hospitals, maimed children, prolific and horrific death – and archival footage of the university's own precedent for staging mass demonstrations for humanitarian causes.
In particular, the 1968 occupation of Hamilton Hall, in which students demanded the university sever ties to the US war in Vietnam; in late April, the Palestinian protesters occupied the building with a similar demand. They renamed it Hind Hall, in honor of a seven-year-old girl killed by the IDF after watching her entire family shot (the film includes her devastating phone call to emergency workers with subtitles, shortly before she and the ambulance ferrying her were bombed).
'Students have always been on the right side of history,' said Pritsker, himself a former pro-Palestinian campus organizer. 'Students protested the Vietnam war. They protested Jim Crow. They protested South African apartheid and they protested the war in Iraq. Students were not wrong about any of those things. And it's ironic, because Columbia celebrates that history.'
'Some of the biggest protests against South African apartheid happened at Columbia. Some of the biggest protests for the civil rights movement happened at Columbia,' he added. 'And Columbia looks back on those moments and says, 'Oh, look at how forward-thinking and progressive Columbia is. Look at how this happened on our campus. We're a leader in history. Come to Columbia and you can be like these people.' Well, that moment is now.'
In 2024, as in 1968, the university resorted to calling the police when negotiations failed. The Encampments includes footage seen across the news last year: officers shooting rubber bullets and teargas into demonstrations, dragging protesters across the street. Additionally, police doing nothing to stop counter-protesters who attacked encampments; at UCLA, some even threw lit fireworks at protesting students.
'It was really shocking to see so many campuses in the United States turned into police states over this,' said Pritsker of Columbia calling for the NYPD to end the encampment, which precipitated police crackdowns across the country. 'We started the film with a question: what was it about a bunch of students camping out on lawns that was so incomprehensible, so impermissible to the politicians, to the media, to the ruling class of this country, that they would rather arrest students, teargas them, handcuff them, than stop investing in companies that are complicit in war crimes?'
Those actions now include cooperating with the Trump administration to investigate students who have criticized Israel, aggressively discipline students who engage in pro-Palestinian disruptions, and plan 'comprehensive' reform of the school's admissions policies, lest they lose out on $400m in federal funding. The film ends with a haunting post-script as the crackdown begins: Khalil remains in detention; five days after his arrest, Miner was expelled, along with 22 other students who were involved in the occupation of Hind Hall. Some had their degrees revoked.
At Columbia today, 'obviously there is fear, but I think more than fear, there's anger', said Pritsker. 'People are furious that their administration capitulated to the Trump administration's demands, totally throwing in the towel, basically.'
Still, 'a lot of the students are not going to stop', he added. 'I don't think anyone involved in the Palestinian movement signed up for the movement because they thought it would make them more safe or comfortable. I think most of us understood that it would make us less safe. It might actually pose risks to our safety, but none of that matters because if none of us are safe – if someone out there is under the threat of being bombed or being shot at any moment on any given day – then we're all unsafe.'
The Encampments is out now in US cinemas with a UK date to be announced