Resisting Repression: What’s Next for the Student Fight for Palestine?

On Dec. 12, 2023, SUNY Purchase College student Cesar Paul walked into an administrator’s office and headed straight for the window, where a pair of “We Stand With Israel” banners hung facing the campus plaza. Then, Paul took the banners down in protest because, he said, Purchase College was guilty of “double standards.”

After October 2023, the Purchase campus became a protest site for students like Paul who wanted to raise awareness about Palestinians’ struggle for liberation against Israeli occupation. But Paul says advocating for Palestine on campus was “dangerous.” “Students would put up [printouts of] Palestinian flags, and they would be taken down immediately,” he says. “There were students putting things up about Israel, and it was fine.”

But the double standards weren’t just relegated to the materials students hung on walls. Paul says the double standards included an institutional stance that Purchase’s leadership took with Israel. On Oct. 10, 2023, Purchase President Milagros Peña sent a university-wide email stating “New York stands with the people of Israel.” A few sentences following, Peña wrote, “We also recognize that this conflict is devastating to the residents of Gaza.” The word “Palestine” does not appear anywhere in the email.

“Why isn’t Purchase talking about Palestine?” Paul wondered. He was certain that Purchase, which “claims to be diverse” and “will always talk about what’s going on in the world” would eventually “do something for Palestine,” he says. But as weeks went by, and the Palestinian death toll skyrocketed, no email was sent to acknowledge the beginnings of a genocide.

Then there was the hypocrisy, Paul says. The Purchase administration did not acknowledge that Palestinians have resisted occupation for more than a century—the last 77 years of which Israel has been the primary occupying power. When Peña released a university-wide email on Nov. 21, 2023, honoring “the Wappinger and Lenape people,” whose land Purchase’s campus occupies, Paul was “confident the school would advocate for Indigenous people [in Palestine], as they did for Indigenous people here.” But, he says, “I was wrong.”

Paul decided to advocate for Palestine himself—he draped his body in a large Palestine flag and wore it to school. But that, too, was met with resistance. “More than five times I was approached for wearing a Palestinian flag,” he says. The first interaction he remembers was with an elderly female student who yelled at him, “Palestinians are the bad people.” Another time, a female student followed him through a parking lot to ask him if he “condemns the actions of Hamas.” 

“Every day felt like a fight,” Paul says. “I felt like I was just constantly protesting, even though I was simply wearing a flag.”

Yet the two “We Stand With Israel” banners hung for weeks in the office window of Paul Nicholson, the school’s director of special programs and ombudsman, despite campus policy prohibiting both banners and large materials on windows.

Paul’s decision to take them down was to “inspire the student body to not abide by these double standards,” he says. “To not be silent.”

Paul knew he would likely face consequences. He expected Nicholson to tell him to stop or maybe call security to have Paul removed from the office. But something else happened. “As I’m taking the banners down, he cursed at me and grabbed me. He was grabbing me so tightly that even though I was wearing a really puffy jacket … I could feel it,” Paul says. “He shook me back and forth and pushed me toward the floor.”

A video recorded by Paul and posted online shows a scuffle between the two before Paul falls to the floor. Nicholson can be heard shouting in the background, “No you’re not. Get the fuck out of here!”

“I called for help immediately,” Paul explains. “I was in survival mode.”

A few hours after the incident, Paul received a call from Patricia Bice, vice president for student affairs and enrollment management. He had been placed on interim suspension amid a pending investigation. At 6:15 p.m. that same day, the New York State University Police, also known as UPD, released a university-wide email stating that it was notified of “an anti-Semitic incident” and investigating the circumstance “as a possible hate crime,” emails obtained by YES! Media show.

The following day, on Dec. 13, 2023, Peña released her own university-wide email, asserting that Purchase College had “zero tolerance for antisemitic behavior or any other act of hate or bias.” 

Nicholson faced no repercussions. He did not respond to a request for comment.

At the time that these emails were sent, there had not yet been a student conduct hearing where Paul could explain his actions or clarify that he was not motivated by antisemitism. To the contrary, Paul says he wanted to remove banners that made him and other students feel unsafe. 

“[The banners] are advocating for the right of Israel to genocide Palestinians,” he says. “A Palestinian student told me they took different routes [to class] because they didn’t feel safe.” Yet, in describing the incident, UPD “immediately threw out these words—‘hate crime,’” while the university’s president indirectly suggested the incident was “antisemitic.” Days later, Paul was officially charged by the Office of Student Conduct with five violations, most of which he says were false.

“Then the media came in,” Paul adds. “I was thrown into this information war.”

In a series of articles published by local and national media outlets, including the New York Post and Yahoo! News, Paul was painted as an aggressor. The New York Post claimed that he “stormed into the office.” In one article published by the National Review (a conservative magazine that is allied with Israel and even ran a story titled “It’s Time for Israel to Unleash Hell”), the author relies on an anonymous source who claims Paul attacked Nicholson. Only Paul and Nicholson were present inside the office at the time of the incident.

Every day felt like a fight. I felt like I was just constantly protesting, even though I was simply wearing a flag.”

Paul, who is Afro-Latino, says he decided to record the incident to protect himself. “Taking my camera out was my defense mechanism,” he says. “Otherwise, people will perceive me as being aggressive.”

But the recording didn’t prevent those assumptions. Readers left comments on the articles, calling Paul a “thug” and calling for him to be expelled or even jailed. Others “made fun of my hair,” he says. Months later, he received a message from an individual whom he did not know that read: “terrorist bitch.” 

“It really devastated me,” Paul says of the university’s response and the backlash he faced as a result. “It took a big toll on my mental health.”

More than one year since the incident, Paul has still not been allowed to return to class. After being charged with five violations in December 2023, which ranged from removing property to inflicting harm, abuse, and injury, he says an advisor suggested he just accept the charges, even if it meant being expelled. But Paul was determined to fight. In June 2024, he sued the school, alleging that he was attacked by Nicholson and excessively punished because he criticized Israel and supported Palestine.

“They’ll say that I just wanted to destroy property, but what I did was a symbol of me saying, ‘Down with white supremacy, Zionism, and the oppression of Arab and African peoples,’” Paul says. “Israel is involved in the suffering of Black people in countries across the world, whether it’s Sudanese, Congolese, Haitian, or Black people in America.”

Paul entered Purchase’s disciplinary process in late December 2023, which included several administrative hearings that were conducted by a single staff member serving as a hearing officer. Paul requested a committee hearing, which is conducted by three people instead of one, and can involve a student who listens to the case. But Purchase does not hold committee hearings beginning the Monday before the last two weeks of the semester through winter break, making an administrative hearing his only option at the time.

“The waters of due process were muddied the moment Cesar [Paul]’s actions were deemed an ‘anti semitic hate crime’ prior to any fair hearing,” Maryam Fatouh, Paul’s lawyer, wrote in an email. “From that point on, there were countless procedural missteps on the part of Purchase College, including its failure to produce Mr. Nicholson for questioning, despite my client’s requests. Given the seriousness of the allegations of physical assault, and Mr. Nicholson’s direct, first hand knowledge of the incident, Cesar [Paul] should have been afforded his legal right to directly question the individual making accusations against him.”

Ultimately, Paul’s fate was decided by that single staff member, who questioned the two UPD officers who wrote the incident reports as “witnesses” despite neither of the officers being present at the time of the incident. As Fatouh notes, Nicholson was not required to be a witness, and he was not questioned during the hearing process. Student-conduct records show Paul was declared responsible for two of the five charges, suspended for one semester, and placed on disciplinary probation for one academic year. The terms of his suspension declared him “persona non grata,” which banned him from campus. 

Paul appealed the suspension soon after, asserting that the punishment was excessive, but it was denied. Then in April 2024, Paul rode a bus to a march at the SUNY headquarters in Albany, where student organizers from multiple colleges gathered to protest the school system’s investments in Israel. On his way there, the bus stopped at Purchase. Paul got off the bus briefly and stood on the edge of campus to record a video, where he spoke out against his ban from Purchase grounds while Nicholson was able to “walk on campus facing no repercussions.”

He was once again charged for violating the terms of his suspension. In February 2025, Purchase extended his suspension up until January 2026—effectively pushing his education back two years. “They’re trying to expel me, without labeling it as that,” he says. “They’re trying to put me to other students as an example—to be afraid to speak up.”

But Paul is still speaking up. He continues to fight to resume his education at Purchase while advocating for Palestinian liberation and his fellow student protesters. Since being suspended, he’s spoken during protests at several other campuses, often emphasizing his solidarity with Palestinians as “a Black, gay boy in America.”

“We’re living in times where we must put our morals to the test,” he says. “Nelson Mandela once said, ‘We know too well that our freedom is not complete without the freedom of the Palestinians.’”

Free Speech for Whom?

Paul’s story is just one in an ecosystem of college students who have been targeted for protesting Israel and advocating for Palestinian liberation. Students have been accused of being antisemitic, harassed and beaten, and doxxed while university administrations have (for the most part) looked the other way—or used pro-Israel outrage as fuel to dish out excessive disciplinary punishments such as suspensions and expulsions. 

Meanwhile, a collaborative crackdown between administrators and law enforcement has resulted in mass campus arrests, surveillance, evictions, and FBI-affiliated raids of students’ family homes. Now, immigrant students are disappearing in a targeted campaign to capture, detain, and deport non-citizens who support Palestine. Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student who was a negotiator at Columbia University during the encampment, was abducted by ICE on Mar. 8, 2025, and has been detained since, despite not being charged with a crime. 

Ranjani Srinivasan, another Columbia student who attended protests for Palestine and posted on social media, fled to Canada on Mar. 11, 2025, after ICE revoked her student visa and the university “de-enrolled” her. Yunseo Chung, another Columbia student who attended similar protests, is suing the Trump administration after ICE agents tried to arrest and deport her. Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who wrote an op-ed in support of the student senate’s divestment resolution, was snatched off the street by masked ICE agents on Mar. 25, 2025. And Momodou Taal, a student activist at Cornell University who was also suing the Trump administration, was forced to leave the U.S. after his student visa was also revoked.

But as the general public’s focus rapidly shifts from fascism abroad to fascism in the United States, it must not forget the Palestinians still under siege in Gaza and the West Bank. Even after a “ceasefire” agreement was reached between Israel and Hamas in January, Israel repeatedly violated it and continued to starve and kill Palestinians. Israel officially ended the ceasefire agreement when it bombed Gaza once again on Mar. 18, 2025, killing more than 400 people, many of whom were children.

“The United States is a huge player in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people,” says Tori Porell, a staff attorney with Palestine Legal, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization that supports Palestine advocates. “The movement here is very important in the movement for Palestinian liberation—which is also why it has faced so much backlash.”

With Israel’s resumption of genocidal bombing and aid blocks, and the U.S. president touting the possibility of turning Gaza into a resort, student activism for Palestine is only gaining momentum. But by targeting the close ties academic institutions have to Israeli and U.S. imperialism through investments and business affiliations, the modern student divestment movement is showing us the lengths universities will go to in order to shield those ties. 

Universities rely on excessive disciplinary processes, policing, and allegations of antisemitism to silence, criminalize, and discredit students who dare to demand an education free of human rights abuses. 

Since the early 2010s, Palestine Legal has been supporting those who face this repression—providing legal advice, training, and litigation support to college students, grassroots activists, and communities involved in Palestine advocacy. From its extensive research and legal cases, the organization has gained a critical understanding of the forces encouraging repression of the movement for Palestinian liberation. 

“A lot of people are kind of aware of AIPAC and the wider Israel lobby that exerts so much influence on our government,” Porell says. “But there are also even more targeted organizations and operations working to suppress the pro-Palestine movement and the student movement, in particular.”

In 2015, Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights co-published a 124-page report titled “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech” that details how “a network of advocacy organizations, public relations firms, and think tanks” use a variety of tactics to “pressure universities, government actors, and other institutions to censor or punish advocacy in support of Palestinian rights.” 

Donald Trump and his administration are only joining this bandwagon, leveraging existing legal avenues like executive orders and the United States’ decades-old anti-Palestinian terrorism laws to deport international students who protest Israel and stop the divestment movement’s widespread influence on college campuses. Trump’s Day 1 executive order targeting international students who engage in protest for Palestine aims to further “weaponize universities as arms of the surveillance state and encourage universities to report their own students for free speech activity,” Porell says.

It builds on a 2018 executive order from his previous term in office, which sought to have the Department of Education adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism, “a very politicized definition … that includes nearly all criticism of Israel,” Porell says. In March, the Trump administration revoked $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University for “tolerating antisemitism on campus,” The Guardian reported. Columbia agreed to a series of policy changes in order to restore the funding, meaning Trump successfully pressured a university to prioritize its cash flow over free speech rights.

The United States is a huge player in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. The movement here is very important in the movement for Palestinian liberation—which is also why it has faced so much backlash.”

But universities share blame for fostering campus climates hostile to free speech and immigrants. “Universities might assume the position of ‘this is not us, this is the [presidential] administration,’ but they very much created the environment for these things to be possible,” says Patrice, an international graduate student worker and labor union organizer at New York University (NYU), who is using a pseudonym to protect her identity. “For the last year, universities like NYU have engaged in mischaracterizing and slandering their own students—categorizing them as disruptive and giving into dangerous narratives about members of our community.”

Right-wing groups have also formulated plans to silence Palestine activism on individual college campuses and elsewhere. Kenneth Marcus, who worked as Trump’s assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education during his first presidential term, is the founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a nonprofit organization that has launched a wave of lawsuits against universities, including Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, claiming they are not doing enough to combat antisemitism on their campuses.

Alongside the Brandeis Center is the Heritage Foundation—the conservative think tank behind Project 2025—which also uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition in Project Esther, a little-known but incredibly authoritarian initiative posited as a “national strategy to combat antisemitism.” Porell says Project Esther is a “companion to Project 2025” that offers a “blueprint for crushing the pro-Palestine movement in the U.S.” 

Project Esther hopes to mischaracterize the movement for Palestinian liberation so much that Americans view it similarly to how they view the Ku Klux Klan. The Heritage Foundation is attempting to achieve this by claiming that activists, nonprofit workers, government officials, and journalists who advocate for Palestine are all part of a global “Hamas Support Network” that must be dismantled. Because the U.S. government has designated Hamas, another government entity, as a foreign terrorist organization, Porell warns that falsely linking those who are or perceived to be within the Palestinian liberation movement to Hamas unlocks a legal strategy for the government and legal organizations to target them. 

“Not only is that a messaging strategy to delegitimize the movement, but the U.S. has very harsh antiterrorism laws,” Porell explains. Accusing individuals of terrorism can lead to “government surveillance, a law-enforcement investigation, even criminal or civil prosecution.”

Elements of Project Esther are already being pursued. And if the wider plan is successful, it will reduce free speech in the U.S., leaving no corner of society untouched. That means the tactics being used on college campuses can eventually be weaponized across institutions, corporations, workplaces, and levels of government against anyone who criticizes Israel, advocates for Palestinians (or any oppressed people for that matter), or even critiques capitalism. A new wave of authoritarianism would be ushered in, threatening the future of all leftist organizing and the people’s right to dissent. 

Though these forms of repression are not completely unprecedented, mimicking 1950s McCarthyism and other surveillance strategies used to target civil rights leaders, they “absolutely exploded after October 2023,” Porell adds. “Many universities across the country changed their policies around protest or speech on campus and made them much more restrictive than they were before, and that was directly a result of students speaking up for Palestine.” 

Once those policies are on the books, universities can use them against any students speaking out. “Palestine is the canary in the coal mine for our free speech rights,” she adds. “Today it is Palestine activists, but tomorrow it could be antiracist activists or pro-immigrant advocates.”

That makes learning to resist this repression and out organize the opposition even more dire. In the long fight ahead, students are reevaluating their strategies and developing new organizing defenses to secure a movement that will survive not only the Trump administration but also the rise of a coordinated right-wing movement.

Community Solidarity

Though he is isolated from campus and his peers, Paul is not completely alone. At the same time that a wave of backlash was making him feel distraught, his fellow students and comrades within the wider SUNY ecosystem came to his defense.

One peer helped Paul start a Change.org petition to demand fair disciplinary action. Nearly 20,000 people have signed the petition. A group of more than 30 Jewish students also sent a letter addressed to the Purchase administration, writing that “a student [who] pays tuition at your college has far more value than a piece of paper endorsing one of the most brutal apartheid regimes in recent history.” Paul sent the signatures to the administration, and though “they acted like it was nothing,” he says community support made him feel like “everything was gonna be OK.”

Closer to home, two unaffiliated student groups at Purchase known as Raise the Consciousness and a newer initiative, the Purchase Solidarity Coalition, continue to fight for Paul, organizing phone banks to pressure administrators. “Words cannot explain my appreciation, how deeply grateful I am,” Paul says. “It felt so fulfilling because my original mission was to inspire other students.”

Raise the Consciousness has also planned a series of direct actions, which have included protests and sit-ins, to hold Purchase accountable for its excessive punishments and meet demands for divestment. But student organizers with the group face their own surveillance threats. On Mar. 10, 2025, the Department of Education announced that it was investigating 60 universities, including Purchase. While the DOE claims these investigations are about combating antisemitism, students assert that the DOE’s actual goal is to silence support for Palestine. 

“We reject the dishonest conflation of anti zionism and antisemitism,” wrote Raise the Consciousness, the Purchase Solidarity Coalition, and Jewish Voice for Peace at Purchase in a joint statement released on Mar. 19. “The Department of Education’s so-called investigations are part of an ongoing smear campaign against students opposing our universities’ financial backing of U.S./Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people.”

One organizer, who asked to be called “Rin,” says that Raise the Consciousness has been “on the radar of the administration” since it staged a protest during Accepted Students Day in 2024. When the collective launched an encampment on May 2, 2024, “[the police] literally outnumbered the students,” Rin says. “Everyone was arrested,” including professors, despite eyewitnesses observing that the demonstration was peaceful until police showed up.

Though students were disciplined soon after, they managed to fight off suspensions. The administration was being “torn apart by critics on both sides,” says Rin; in addition to facing backlash over the violent arrests of students, Peña was also under pressure from some pro-Israel groups to address antisemitism on campus. “So they entertained a ‘good-faith conversation’ in the hopes it would stop a resurgence in our encampment,” Rin says. 

On May 6, 2024, selected representatives from the Gaza solidarity encampment met with Peña and other administrators to negotiate. According to a document obtained by YES! Media that lists “verbal agreements” made during the meeting, university leadership agreed to “make public all investment records…in the interest of transparency,” grant amnesty to students facing disciplinary charges from the encampment, and for the president to release “a statement to the campus community regarding the ongoing events in Palestine, specifically addressing how her previous communication has caused harm.” 

Student organizers agreed to disperse all student encampments so long as the agreements were upheld. It is unclear how many of the resolution’s eight total agreements that the Purchase administration has followed through on. But on Oct. 2, 2024, students staged a sit-in over “the administration’s dismissal of our Encampment Resolution,” an Instagram post by Raise the Consciousness reads. The outcome is not unique; other universities have begun to walk back their divestment commitments.

For Rin, the resolution’s life cycle only underscores the need for students to organize more often and more directly. But university police wouldn’t forget the names of student organizers who had been charged for participating in the May encampment. 

After the action, Rin says students were heavily surveilled and targeted by UPD, including being stopped outside of their dorm rooms on the way to class, pressured into interrogations, egged on by officers while in the dining hall, or accused of being behind autonomous actions students performed on campus like banner drops and chalking. Rin adds that heavy police surveillance contributed to a culture where Raise the Consciousness was “blacklisted”; no student government club wanted to “get too close” to the group in fear of having their funding cut.

“Whenever they couldn’t bust you for something, they would make your life miserable and like looking over your shoulder,” Rin explains. 

The surveillance emphasized the need for a decentralized, collective network of student organizations and groups. “How can we turn every space into a political activism space?” Rin asks. “With [the Purchase Solidarity Coalition], this was the idea.”

Though in its initial phases, the Purchase Solidarity Coalition will work to “address the immediate material needs of the community” at Purchase while building a network with other student groups that are aware of the issues marginalized students face, Rin explains.

“There is untapped potential of these clubs to be hot spots for how we organize, especially in light of the threats that come with the Trump presidency,” he adds. “Palestine is still at the forefront of our minds, [as are] Congo, Sudan, and everywhere beyond Purchase, but we also have a bunch of immediate needs in the campus community.”

In addition to organizing for divestment, the Purchase Solidarity Coalition’s immediate functions include supporting Black, Brown, transgender, and undocumented students, especially as these students face increasing threats when they are involved in organizing. “If people are fearing for their safety, struggling to make ends meet, [or] experiencing repression in their daily lives, then they’re going to be less able to organize,” Rin explains.

The Purchase Solidarity Coalition has already served as a funnel to connect students with Westchester ICE Watch, a local immigrants rights group. Rin says 18 students have been connected with the group so far, while others have circulated “Know Your Rights” flyers around campus. As the coalition grows, Rin hopes to fundraise to support students who need legal counsel. Beyond that, he hopes to eventually establish a student tenant union to demand better housing conditions and protect student activists residing in dormitories.

“Where leftist organizing is today is, I think there’s a realization that is occurring for a lot of people, more so under Trump, that is how politicized everybody’s lives are. You cannot live an unpolitical life,” Rin says. “Everything from your student loans, to the color of your skin, your sexual orientation and gender identity—everything that we do, are, live, and like—is a political issue.”

Multiple staff and administrators at Purchase College—including Nicholson—were contacted for this article, but did not respond to requests for comment.

Student Union Power

Like many other campuses after October 2023, New York University’s became a hub for student organizing against Israeli occupation: NYU students waged multiple encampments pressuring their university to divest and close its satellite campus in Tel Aviv. And like many college administrations, NYU’s also changed its policies over the summer of 2024 in response to the encampments. In August 2024, NYU released an updated code of conduct that stated “Zionist” was now a protected class under its nondiscrimination policy, erasing “the long history of Jewish anti-Zionism, which has existed as long as Zionism itself,” wrote Natasha Lennard, a Jewish journalist, for The Intercept.

More recently, Patrice says the administration has “given leverage” to groups like Mothers Against Campus Antisemitism (MACA), a Facebook group of more than 62,000 parents whose founder has bragged about pressuring NYU to more harshly punish Palestine activists. Meanwhile, a far-right group, Betar U.S., is building lists of immigrant students to deport.

In a time where universities are allowing government overreach, and college administrators accept borderline harassment and online stalking of their students, unions can offer tangible legal protections against targeted punishments, sanctions, and criminalization. Patrice, who is an organizer with the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) at NYU, which represents more than 2,000 graduate student employees, says the union is fighting for the rights of students to protest for Palestine on their campus: “GSOC has been at the forefront of political organizing for students, even before the current protests.”

Drawing on its history as the first graduate student union to endorse the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement in 2016, GSOC is continuing to advocate for a holistic set of principles as a union that “includes protections for workers who are international and workers who want to exercise political speech,” Patrice says.

One strategy GSOC uses to invoke protections includes filing grievances that require the university to meet with union members. Filing grievances is one way the union can support students by fighting “in community and in solidarity” when members are targeted for campus organizing, she adds. 

After students staged a sit-in at Bobst Library last December, NYU suspended 13 students, including a GSOC member, on “little evidence,” Patrice says. “If the new norm becomes that you can be suspended for quietly sitting in the library studying” then students are discouraged from “being present, near, or associated with campus organizing.”

The union filed a grievance in defense of the student, alleging that a suspension violated the “discipline and discharge” clause in their contract with the university, which requires just cause. The suspension was dropped, and the grievance later denied (a common occurrence over the past year, says Patrice), but the grievances, one-on-one support with sanctioned students, along with support from 100 union alumni who pledged to boycott donations to NYU, could have applied collective pressure. “For someone to help you through a student conduct meeting—like a union representative—that grassroots support is really essential,” she explains.

But the underlying goal is to form a stronger contract with NYU. For GSOC, a strong contract includes measures that prohibit NYPD and ICE from accessing campus buildings—a pressing need, as Homeland Security searches dorms and arrests students at other universities. Universities are showing their true colors when it comes to policing. They don’t just open their campuses to police departments to surveil students, they act as collaborative partners to identify, investigate, and charge student protesters and activist groups. 

Victoria, another international graduate student worker and union steward who is also using a pseudonym, says that police presence at NYU has increased since the encampments, but that NYU has “no mechanisms” for recording NYPD activity in and throughout campus buildings, which will be the first step to solidify protections against them. “NYPD is now being allowed to arrest, brutalize, and collect information on students, which should never be allowed,” she says. 

Victoria says NYPD arrested students after the library sit-in but were also patrolling campus buildings for minor incidents, including after finding graffiti. “That’s a much lower standard for heavy police action,” she says. That’s why GSOC is working to make the language in its contract with NYU more specific and draw clear guidelines on how the university can interact with law enforcement. The union hopes to extend protections that will prohibit NYU from allowing law enforcement, including ICE, to target international graduate student workers. 

Beyond forming a new contract, GSOC is offering critical community spaces for students to express concerns, evaluate strategies, and plan collective courses of action. It has established a contact stream for international students who are concerned about Trump’s executive order and begun hosting town halls for international students. These are just initial steps to negotiating “with the main institution that has brought you to the U.S. and through that, other institutions,” Victoria says. 

From those negotiations, students can build preventative measures into their contracts and take necessary action when universities violate their rights. “As a first-generation international student, you can feel very lonely in your relationship with the university,” she adds. “The union is a community that can give collective power to a group that otherwise would not have much.”

The Movement Lives

Despite all of the repression students have faced from their colleges and the government, they are no less committed to the movement for Palestinian liberation than they were before. In fact, it continues to grow beyond the lines of major cities. 

Adam, an organizer with SB4Palestine at Stony Brook University in Long Island who asked to be identified by first name only, says organizers with the group are committed to building a suburban mass movement, despite being suspended, arrested, and evicted from their dorms for their activism. The group is in the process of building a stronger organizing network on Long Island by engaging with surrounding communities and addressing other pressing needs like attacks on immigrants.

To stay prepared for the next phase of organizing under Trump, Adam says organizers are looking to the Black Panther Party and Vietnam anti-war protests for inspiration, studying these movements to learn what they accomplished during their time, what impeded their success, and how to evolve in a heavily surveilled society.

“It was almost impossible for [the Panthers] to understand how big surveillance would become, what kind of technology would be developed, the programs the FBI would pursue to defeat this revolutionary attitude,” Adam says. “This repression will always be coming at us. Learning and growing from there, I truly believe that revolution is possible.”

Meanwhile, Paul is unsure if he will ever return to Purchase, noting how difficult it is to feel welcomed back by the institution that targeted you. Regardless, he says he will “continue to fight and tell my story.” 

“There are many students like me who are facing severe punishments for their stances against genocide,” he adds. “I only hope my story inspires [them] to break through that fear and to fight for each other.” 

And they already are. For example, Jewish students at Columbia recently chained themselves to a gate to protest ICE’s capture of Khalil. Though the Trump administration is counting on inducing fear, students continue to protest, organize, and try new methods of direct action.

That’s because they believe in a future where their universities do not invest in war or genocide—and that belief holds firm, no matter who tries to silence them.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 4:50pm PT on April 9, 2025 to correct the year of Milagros Peña’s Dec. 13, 2023 email, when Palestine Legal started, and the year the “Palestine Exception to Free Speech” report was published. Read our corrections policy here.