New York Police Department officers in riot gear arrested scores of protesters who filled the library at Columbia University on Wednesday.
The arrests marked the latest tumult over the Israel-Hamas war on the Ivy League campus, which has been home to prominent protests, large police operations, and immigration arrests of activists in recent months and years.
The university requested the NYPD on campus after a large group of protesters forced their way into the library in the afternoon, injuring two Columbia Public Safety Officers, the university president’s office said in a statement.
Activists said campus officers responding to the protest choked and beat them.
The protesters were “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,” according to the university.
“These actions are outrageous,” acting university president Claire Shipman wrote in the statement, adding, “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 officials told 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 were seen pushing their way into the Butler Library, according to social media video posted by students.
The protest involved about 60 people, and about 30 were seen being led out of the building by officers into police buses, The New York Times reported. About 40 were arrested overall, according to 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 said the demonstration was inspired by Basel al-Araj, a Palestinian activist and writer who was killed in Ramallah in 2017. Israel accused al-Araj of plotting terror attacks on Israeli targets.
The demonstration comes at a sensitive time for Columbia, which is currently negotiating to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding the Trump administration pulled this spring while alleging the university had failed to stop campus antisemitism amid widespread campus protests over the war in Gaza.
In March, Columbia announced a series of reforms largely in line with the Trump administration’s conditions to restore funding, including banning face masks during protests and expanding a campus police force.
Representative Stefanik, a vocal critic of Columbia, hammered the university 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 previously arrested over 100 activists on campus in 2024 when demonstrators occupied a building, the first such mass arrests since the anti-Vietnam War protests.
In addition to threatening Columbia’s funding, the Trump administration has arrested multiple legal permanent student activists who were part of the campus Palestine movement, including Mohsen Mahdawi, who was released in April, and Mahmoud Khalil, who remains in detention.
