Nothing on an American campus had looked like it since 1970. In the last weeks of the spring 2024 semester, students at more than 130 universities pitched tents on quads and lawns to demand divestment from companies tied to Israel's war on Gaza, and their universities answered with the heaviest wave of campus policing in half a century. Between April 17 and the end of the academic year, somewhere between 3,100 and 3,300 people were arrested at U.S. campus protests.
It began at Columbia on the morning of April 17, when students set up the first Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the South Lawn, demanding the university divest and disclose its endowment's ties to the war. President Minouche Shafik called the NYPD onto campus the next day. Officers arrested 108 students; the encampment re-formed within hours. That sequence of occupation, police response, and immediate regrowth turned out to be the whole spring in miniature, and the model traveled fast: tents in an iconic campus space, formal divestment demands, faculty negotiating committees, internal mutual-aid kitchens and medic tents. Within a week it had reached Yale, NYU, Northwestern, Brown, USC, Emory, UT Austin, Princeton, MIT, Michigan, Wisconsin, the UC and CUNY systems, Harvard, Penn, Vanderbilt, and dozens more.
The raids
The police responses varied in force but converged on a template.
- Columbia — Hamilton Hall, night of April 30. NYPD officers in tactical gear stormed the occupied building; 282 people were arrested in the coordinated sweep.
- UCLA — night of May 1. A pro-Israel counter-mob attacked the encampment for hours while LAPD stood by. When police finally moved, they arrested the demonstrators, not the assailants.
- Emory — morning of April 25. Georgia State Patrol troopers cleared the camp within hours; footage of economics professor Caroline Fohlin being tackled and arrested circulated worldwide.
- UT Austin — April 24. Mounted state troopers swept the lawn; 79 arrested.
- USC — April 24. More than 90 arrested, on the campus that had already stripped valedictorian Asna Tabassum of her commencement speech.
- City College of New York — night of April 30. Cleared by NYPD in the same coordinated operation as Columbia.
After the arrests
The criminal cases moved through dozens of jurisdictions across the summer and fall. Most ended in dismissals, adjournments in contemplation of dismissal, or community service. A substantial minority went to contested motions and bench trials, generating a body of First Amendment and use-of-force litigation that public-space protest law will be living with for years.
The more durable punishment came from the universities themselves. Thousands of students faced disciplinary suspensions, expulsion proceedings, eviction from campus housing, withheld degrees, and campus bans — sanctions imposed with none of the criminal system's procedural checks, in many cases outlasting the dropped charges they accompanied. Dozens of faculty members across the country were sanctioned, placed on leave, denied tenure, or fired for supporting their students.
The arrest census, compiled independently by the Crowd Counting Consortium, the Brennan Center, the Civil Liberties Defense Center, and the National Lawyers Guild, makes spring 2024 one of the largest American mass-arrest episodes of the post-Ferguson decade. NPPC tracks the criminal cases still pending and lists the named defendants whose prosecutions continue.
