NYPD riot police arrest Palestine protesters occupying Columbia library as college negotiates with Trump administration over funding | EUROtoday

New York Police Department officers in riot gear arrested scores of protesters who crammed the library at Columbia University on Wednesday.

The arrests marked the newest tumult over the Israel-Hamas battle on the Ivy League campus, which has been house to outstanding protests, massive police operations, and immigration arrests of activists in latest months and years.

The college requested the NYPD on campus after a big group of protesters pressured their approach into the library within the afternoon, injuring two Columbia Public Safety Officers, the college president’s workplace mentioned in a press release.

Activists mentioned campus officers responding to the protest choked and beat them.

The protesters had been “repeatedly asked for identification and to leave, and were repeatedly told that failure to comply would result in violations of our rules and policies and possible arrest for trespassing,” in keeping with the college.

“These actions are outrageous,” appearing college president Claire Shipman wrote within the assertion, including, “Requesting the presence of the NYPD is not the outcome we wanted, but it was absolutely necessary to secure the safety of our community.”

At the “direct request of Columbia University, the NYPD responded to an ongoing situation on campus where individuals have occupied a library and are trespassing,” police officers instructed The Independent. “Multiple individuals who did not comply with verbal warnings by the NYPD to disperse were taken into custody. Charges are pending.”

Masked demonstrators had been seen pushing their approach into the Butler Library, in keeping with social media video posted by college students.

The protest concerned about 60 folks, and about 30 had been seen being led out of the constructing by officers into police buses, The New York Times reported. About 40 had been arrested total, in keeping with Representative Elise Stefanik of New York.

“The flood shows that as long as Columbia funds and profits from imperialist violence, the people will continue to disrupt Columbia’s profits and legitimacy,” the activist group Columbia University Apartheid Divest wrote on Substack of the demonstration. “Repression breeds resistance – if Columbia escalates repression, the people will continue to escalate disruptions on this campus.”

Activists mentioned the demonstration was impressed by Basel al-Araj, a Palestinian activist and author who was killed in Ramallah in 2017. Israel accused al-Araj of plotting terror assaults on Israeli targets.

The demonstration comes at a delicate time for Columbia, which is at present negotiating to revive tons of of thousands and thousands of {dollars} in federal funding the Trump administration pulled this spring whereas alleging the college had did not cease campus antisemitism amid widespread campus protests over the battle in Gaza.

In March, Columbia introduced a sequence of reforms largely consistent with the Trump administration’s situations to revive funding, together with banning face masks throughout protests and increasing a campus police power.

Representative Stefanik, a vocal critic of Columbia, hammered the college on X after the arrests.

“President @realDonaldTrump is right: not a single taxpayer dollar should go to a university that allows chaos, antisemitism, and civil rights violations on its campus. Columbia must act – enough is enough,” she wrote.

Riot police beforehand arrested over 100 activists on campus in 2024 when demonstrators occupied a constructing, the primary such mass arrests because the anti-Vietnam War protests.

In addition to threatening Columbia’s funding, the Trump administration has arrested a number of authorized everlasting pupil activists who had been a part of the campus Palestine motion, together with Mohsen Mahdawi, who was launched in April, and Mahmoud Khalil, who stays in detention.