Columbia Suspends Nearly 80 Students for Pro-Palestine Protest Ahead of Deal with Trump Administration and Anti-Defamation League

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While the US and Israel starve 2.1 million Gazans to death, Columbia has worked diligently with Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, to suspend dozens of students for pro-Palestine activism.

HARLEM, NEW YORK – On the afternoon of July 21, Columbia informed nearly 80 students that they had been suspended for one to three years or expelled for joining a May 2025 teach-in about Palestine in honor of the writer and freedom fighter Basel al-Araj, who Israel murdered in an extrajudicial assasination in 2017. The sanctions are believed to be part of a federal deal Columbia is about to announce that includes a formal partnership with the zionist Anti-Defamation League and an agreement to use the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism, which equates criticism of Israel with discrimination against Jews.

Once Barnard joins Columbia in announcing charges, these will be the most suspensions for a single political protest in Columbia campus history and hugely exceed sentencing precedent for teach-ins or non-Palestine-related building occupations.

In collaboration with the Trump administration, Columbia’s Acting President and Board of Trustees Co-Chair, Claire Shipman, illegally restructured the University Judicial Board (UJB) and removed student members and faculty oversight to pursue exceptionally harsh sanctions against its own students. The UJB’s Rules Administrator, akin to a prosecutor, filed charges after protestors flooded Columbia’s largest library to share a syllabus and readings about al-Araj and demand Columbia divest from the Israeli war machine.

Columbia responded to the teach-in by illegally kettling and body slamming protestors who asked to leave, resulting in hospitalization of four students with concussions. Columbia then called the NYPD for Columbia’s third mass arrest since last year. Soon after, the University emailed nearly 80 students to announce that it would introduce sanctions through the illegally restructured Judicial Board. Barnard charges followed.

Meanwhile, President Shipman has cracked down on pro-Palestine organizing in partnership with White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, who devised Trump’s policy of family separation and the Muslim travel ban. Monday afternoon’s suspension and expulsion of nearly 80 students is presumed part of the near-final agreement Shipman negotiated with Miller – similar to the deal Columbia struck with the White House to expel students who allegedly occupied Hind’s Hall. Hind’s Hall was renamed to memorialize Hind Rajab, the six-year-old who Israeli terrorists sprayed with bullets after killing her family while she begged for help.

Students remain committed to ending US- and Columbia-backed Israeli genocide regardless of the school’s sanctions. Testimony from students’ July disciplinary hearings underscored they had nothing to apologize for:

“Every university in Gaza has been destroyed. Hundreds of academics have been killed. Books and archives have been incinerated. Entire families have been erased from the civil registry. This is not a war. It is a campaign of erasure,” explained one student quoted in a Columbia University Apartheid Divest blog post. “Knowledge divorced from struggle is betrayal,” said another.

The disciplinary letters demand suspended students submit apologies in order to return to campus in one to three years, which some students have stated they will refuse. If those protestors hold their ground by refusing to apologize, the suspensions will convert into de facto expulsions and the number of permanent sanctions will skyrocket.

While Columbia likes to position itself as opposed to government overreach, the record demonstrates active collusion, not reluctant concessions.

Columbia’s legal team for the Miller talks is headed by right-wing ideologues Jay Lefkowitz, a Zionist with deep ties to Israel who served in the George W. Bush administration, and Matt Owen, a former law clerk for Antonin Scalia and Neil Gorsuch. In addition to AIPAC speaker Claire Shipman, Columbia’s trustees include Jeh Johnson, who was on the Board of Directors for Lockheed Martin, Andrew Barth, a retired Chairman of Capital Guardian Trust Company – one of the largest shareholders in BlackRock – Dean Dakolias, a member of the pro-Israel lobby with Johnson on the Council on Foreign Relations, and Abigail Elbaum, who is on the board of the New York City Police Foundation.

The trustees use the Trump administration as cover to escalate their Zionist agenda. In an editorial dictated from ICE detention in April, Mahmoud Khalil accused Columbia of “la[ying] the groundwork for [his] abduction” by handing over thousands of pages of student records. Two weeks ago, an ICE official testified in court that the Trump administration uses lists compiled by Canary Mission to identify and, if possible, deport pro-Palestine activists on campus. Much of this has been coordinated through group chats like “Columbia Alumni for Israel,” which includes Columbia faculty and an associate dean who have not been disciplined and whom it is widely believed act as a conduit between Columbia, Canary Mission, and ICE. That chat also includes alumni like Victor Muslin, who is said to help run Canary Mission and has echoed Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s genocidal comparison of Palestinians to “human animals” by advocating for “the powers that be to squash [pro-Palestine students] like roaches.”

“We will not be deterred. We are committed to the struggle for Palestinian liberation,” say the students.

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