The movement against the Gaza war brought the largest campus protest wave since Vietnam — and over 3,100 arrests in the spring of 2024 alone as encampments from Columbia to UCLA were cleared by riot police, followed by expulsions, felony prosecutions of Stop Cop City-style breadth in some states, and Congress's campaign against university administrations deemed insufficiently punitive.

In 2025 the government turned to the LA 8's old weapon at new scale: green-card holders and student-visa activists — Mahmoud Khalil taken from his Columbia apartment, Rümeysa Öztürk seized masked off a Somerville street over an op-ed, Mohsen Mahdawi at his citizenship interview, Badar Khan Suri at his home — detained for deportation on foreign-policy grounds for pro-Palestinian speech. Courts ordered each released through 2025, and in AAUP v. Rubio a federal judge held the ideological-deportation campaign unconstitutional — the LA 8 verdict, relearned under fire, in a struggle still unfolding.