Federal grand juries are a uniquely powerful and uniquely insulated instrument of investigation. They permit prosecutors to compel testimony under penalty of contempt, to operate in secrecy, and to require witnesses to appear without counsel inside the grand-jury room itself. Through 2024, the DOJ used them against U.S. Palestine solidarity organizing networks at a pace not seen since the post-September-11 federal grand-jury campaign against U.S. Muslim charities and the 2010 Chicago / Minneapolis federal grand-jury sweep of antiwar and Palestine-solidarity activists.
What 2024 produced
By the end of 2024, federal grand-jury subpoenas had been served on or in connection with:
- Samidoun (Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network) — The Treasury Department designated Samidoun as a "specially designated global terrorist" in October 2024; in parallel, a federal grand jury (Southern District of New York) sought records of U.S.-based associates, donors, and event organizers.
- U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) — Subpoenas served on regional chapter coordinators seeking organizing documents and communications.
- Multiple campus-encampment-affiliated student organizations — Federal subpoenas in spring/summer 2024 sought university-association records and donor lists in connection with what prosecutors characterized as "material support" investigations.
- Bay Area, New York, and Chicago Palestine-solidarity organizers individually — A pattern of subpoenas seeking testimony about meetings, attendance lists, and financial transfers.
The "material support" theory
The federal statute being deployed in most of these matters is 18 U.S.C. § 2339B — providing "material support or resources" to a designated foreign terrorist organization. The statute is famously broad: the Supreme Court in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010) held that even pure speech in coordination with a designated organization can constitute material support. The Samidoun designation in October 2024 was the key step that made the statute usable against U.S. Palestine solidarity organizing on a scale not previously possible.
What happened in the rooms
Several subpoenaed organizers — supported by counsel from the Center for Constitutional Rights, Palestine Legal, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Civil Liberties Defense Center — refused to testify, invoking First and Fifth Amendment grounds and the long radical tradition of grand-jury refusal that dates to the Puerto Rican Independence movement, the Black Panther grand-jury cases of the 1970s, the 1980s Plowshares grand-jury resistance, the 2010 Carlos Montes / Chicago 14 case, and the 2019 WikiLeaks grand-jury contempt of Chelsea Manning. As of end-of-2024, several grand-jury witnesses faced contempt referrals.
What 2024 prepared
The federal grand-jury wave of 2024 was, in retrospect, the preparation phase. By early 2025 the federal government had pivoted from grand-jury investigation as the principal anti-Palestine-solidarity tool to immigration detention as the principal tool — arresting Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia, Rumeysa Öztürk at Tufts, Mohsen Mahdawi at his green-card interview, Yunseo Chung in New York, Leqaa Kordia in New Jersey, Badar Khan Suri in Virginia. The grand-jury investigations of 2024 had identified the names. The immigration system was the faster machinery.
NPPC tracks the still-active federal grand-jury matters and the post-2024 immigration-detention cases as one continuous federal campaign. They are.
