Columbia Encampment: Raids, $200M Settlement, and Khalil Case

The Columbia Gaza encampment was a pro-Palestinian protest camp that occupied the South Lawn of Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus from April 17 to April 30, 2024, demanding that the university divest from companies tied to Israel. Over two weeks it produced two mass NYPD arrests, the barricaded takeover of Hamilton Hall, the resignation of Columbia’s president, discipline against roughly 80 students, a $200 million federal settlement, and a protest wave that spread to more than 100 campuses. Divestment, the demand that launched it, was rejected.

Who Set Up the Camp and What They Wanted

In the early hours of April 17, 2024, students pitched tents on the South Lawn under the banner of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of about 94 student organizations first formed in 2016 and reactivated in October 2023 after Columbia suspended Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.¹ Their demands were divestment from companies including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Caterpillar; full transparency over Columbia’s investment portfolio; amnesty for disciplined students and faculty; and cancellation of academic partnerships with Tel Aviv University.²

The timing was chosen for maximum visibility. The same day the tents went up, Columbia president Minouche Shafik was in Washington testifying before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce about antisemitism on campus. Over nearly four hours she told lawmakers that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate Columbia’s code of conduct and named specific professors under investigation.³ Committee chair Virginia Foxx accused the university of “gross negligence.”⁴ Faculty back in New York accused Shafik of failing to defend academic freedom.

The Two-Week Timeline

On April 18, Shafik authorized the NYPD to clear the camp, calling it a “harassing and intimidating environment.”⁵ Officers arrested 108 people in the first mass campus arrest Columbia had authorized since the Vietnam War era.⁶ The raid backfired. Students re-established the encampment on the west side of the South Lawn the same day. Faculty held a walkout on April 22, and the AAUP’s Columbia chapter drafted a resolution to censure Shafik. On April 26, the University Senate declared that her administration had “undermined academic freedom and disregarded the privacy and due process rights of students and faculty members,” stopping short of formal censure.⁷

Opinion on campus was divided. More than 3,000 community members signed an open letter urging strict enforcement of ID-only access and existing policies against disruption of classes.⁸

Classes shifted to hybrid on April 22. Negotiations between protest leaders and administrators ran from April 19 through April 28, with a midnight deadline on April 23 followed by a 48-hour extension.⁹ The talks drew national politicians to the gates. House Speaker Mike Johnson visited on April 24 and called for Shafik’s resignation if she could not contain what he described as threats to Jewish students.¹⁰ Representatives Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jamaal Bowman visited on April 25 and 26 in support of the encampment.¹¹

On April 29, Shafik announced the university “will not divest from Israel” and declared talks over. A 2 p.m. ultimatum told demonstrators to leave or face suspension. They voted to stay. Suspensions began that evening.¹¹

Hamilton Hall and the Second Raid

Shortly after midnight on April 30, protesters entered Hamilton Hall, barricaded the doors with furniture and padlocks, and occupied the building. Two university security guards who were inside were later released unharmed.¹² Occupiers renamed the building “Hind’s Hall,” after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian child killed in Gaza, and covered ground-floor windows with copies of the Columbia Daily Spectator to block surveillance.¹³

The building choice was pointed. Students had occupied Hamilton Hall in 1968 during protests against the Vietnam War and a planned Columbia gym in Morningside Park, and again in 1972, 1985, and 1987.¹⁴ CUAD said in a press release that those inside were continuing activism “which Columbia once repressed, but now celebrates.”¹³

That evening, hundreds of NYPD officers in riot gear arrived. Finding the doors barricaded, they used a ladder truck to enter through a second-story window. Officers arrested 109 people across Hamilton Hall and the South Lawn in what the NYPD called a “precision policing” operation. Flash-bang devices were deployed; the department said no tear gas was used.¹⁵ A shelter-in-place alert was in effect, media access was restricted, and by roughly 11:40 p.m., the encampment was gone.¹¹

What Happened in Court

All 46 people arrested inside Hamilton Hall were initially charged with third-degree trespass, a misdemeanor. Those arrested on the lawn faced trespassing and disorderly conduct charges; some Hamilton Hall occupants also faced felony burglary and criminal mischief charges.¹⁵

On June 20, 2024, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office dismissed charges against 31 of the 46 Hamilton Hall defendants, citing prosecutorial discretion, a lack of evidence, and the fact that none had prior criminal records. Because protesters had covered security cameras inside the building, prosecutors had almost no footage.¹⁶ Fourteen others were offered deals that would dismiss their charges if they avoided arrest for six months. All fourteen rejected the offers in what organizers called a “united front,” and they were scheduled to return to court on July 25, 2024. Twelve of the fourteen were not Columbia students or staff.¹⁷ A fifteenth defendant, attorney James Carlson, who had no affiliation with Columbia, faced separate charges including arson for burning an Israeli flag on campus on April 20 and third-degree trespass tied to Hamilton Hall.¹⁸

How Columbia Disciplined Its Own

Columbia’s internal process ran for more than a year. On March 13, 2025, the University Judicial Board issued sanctions against students involved in the Hamilton Hall occupation, including expulsions, multi-year suspensions, and the temporary revocation of degrees. The university did not release specific numbers for each category.¹⁹

A second wave followed a May 7, 2025, protest at Butler Library. Acting president Claire Shipman, appointed on March 28, 2025, authorized the NYPD to clear the library after protesters took a main reading room, forcing roughly 900 students out of study space during finals. Seventy-eight people were arrested and two public safety officers were injured.²⁰ On July 21, 2025, Columbia issued final sanctions against nearly 80 students for Butler Library and earlier encampment-related conduct. Most received two-year suspensions. Some were expelled or had degrees temporarily revoked, and suspended students were reportedly asked to apologize to the university as a condition for return.²¹

Columbia also rebuilt the disciplinary system itself. On May 7, 2025, the Board of Trustees ratified changes that removed students from the University Judicial Board, limited panels to faculty and staff, and centralized processes under the Office of the Provost. The right to request an open hearing and the right to a specific timeframe for proceedings were both eliminated.²²

Antisemitism Findings

The encampment period produced serious allegations of antisemitic conduct, concentrated outside Columbia’s gates but also inside them. On April 18, protesters outside the gates were reported shouting at Jewish students, “The 7th of October is about to be every f***ing day for you.” On April 17, some chanted “We are Hamas” and “Al-Qassam, you make us proud, kill another soldier now.” On April 20, a sign reading “Al-Qasam’s next targets” was pointed toward pro-Israel counter-protesters.²³

Shafik’s Task Force on Antisemitism held more than 20 listening sessions with nearly 500 students. Its August 2024 report described Jewish students being spit on, followed near 116th Street, subjected to slurs including “go back to Poland,” and told “I hope you guys suffer.” One student reported being forced to move out of a dorm after people repeatedly banged on the door in response to a mezuzah. Students compiled over 750 antisemitic posts from the campus platform Sidechat. The task force concluded that many incidents violated university policy and, in some cases, Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act.²⁴

Three deans with responsibility for undergraduate student affairs resigned in August 2024 after text messages they exchanged during a panel on Jewish life became public. Vice Dean Susan Chang-Kim wrote that student complaints “comes from such a place of privilege… hard to hear the woe is me.” Associate Dean Matthew Patashnick wrote that Jewish students were “trying to take full advantage of this moment. Huge fundraising potential.” Dean of Undergraduate Student Life Cristen Kromm responded with vomiting emojis and “Amazing what $$$$ can do.” All three were placed on leave, permanently removed from their positions in July, and resigned the following month.²⁵

The $200 Million Federal Settlement

Federal consequences built quickly once the Trump administration took office. In March 2025, the administration canceled roughly $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia, citing failure to address antisemitism.²⁶ In May 2025, HHS and the Department of Education jointly found that Columbia had violated Title VI by showing “deliberate indifference” toward student-on-student harassment of Jewish students from October 2023 through May 2025, citing failures to enforce time, place, and manner limits on protests, to investigate vandalism including swastikas in classrooms, and to build effective reporting mechanisms before summer 2024.²⁷ In June 2025, the Department of Education separately found Title VI violations and warned the university risked losing over $400 million without corrective action.²⁸

Columbia reached a resolution agreement with the federal government on July 23, 2025. The university agreed to pay $200 million to the United States over three years, plus $21 million to settle employment discrimination claims brought by the EEOC. In return, the government reinstated the “vast majority” of terminated or paused grants, restored eligibility for future funding, and closed pending investigations. Attorney Charles J. Cooper was appointed as independent monitor to oversee compliance.²⁹ The deal required Columbia to ban masked protests, keep trained security officers, cooperate with the NYPD, review its Middle East studies curriculum and admissions processes, and share nondiscrimination compliance data with the federal government. Student discipline and rulemaking authority were shifted from the faculty senate to the Office of the Provost.³⁰ The agreement preserved Columbia’s autonomy over faculty hiring, admissions, and academic decision-making.

Four Presidents in Four Years

Shafik resigned on August 14, 2024, after 13 months in office. In her resignation letter she said the “period of turmoil” had taken a “considerable toll” on her family and that “moving on at this point would best enable Columbia to traverse the challenges ahead.”⁶ She was the third university president to step down after congressional hearings on campus antisemitism, following Harvard’s and Penn’s. Students and faculty were angry over her authorization of police raids and her congressional testimony; congressional Republicans faulted her for not cracking down sooner.³¹

Katrina Armstrong, CEO of Columbia University Irving Medical Center, became interim president.⁶ Claire Shipman, former co-chair of the Board of Trustees, took over as acting president in March 2025.²⁰ In February 2026, Columbia announced that Jennifer Mnookin, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, would become its 21st president on July 1, 2026. Trustees were drawn to her handling of a similar encampment at Wisconsin in May 2024, where she first called police but then negotiated for nine days to reach a peaceful resolution; she said there were “limits to the extent of policing that I was prepared to authorize.” Mnookin described herself as “a principled pragmatist” and will be Columbia’s fifth president in four years.³²

The Mahmoud Khalil Case

The encampment’s most visible individual aftermath was the immigration case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian graduate student who had been a central negotiator for the protesters in April 2024. On March 8, 2025, ICE agents arrested him at his university-owned residence. He was not charged with a crime but was held in an immigration detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, for 104 days.³³

The administration initially sought his removal on national security grounds, citing a determination by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that his presence threatened foreign policy goals related to combating antisemitism. An immigration judge in Louisiana denied bond and ordered his removal based on allegations that he had misrepresented information on his green card application.³⁴ Khalil denied the allegation. His attorneys argued the arrest was warrantless, illegal, and a politically motivated attempt to punish him for protected speech.³⁵

On June 20, 2025, U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz ordered Khalil released on bail, overriding the immigration judge. Farbiarz noted a “lack of violence, a lack of property destruction, a lack of anything that might be characterized as incitement to violence.”³⁴ As of March 2026, Khalil remained in the United States with active cases in both immigration and federal courts and continued to face possible deportation. He is also a named plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging Columbia’s sharing of protester information with Congress. By March 2026, five Columbia-affiliated individuals had been targeted by federal immigration actions tied to the protests.³³

Separately, in February 2025, three students sued Columbia alleging Title VI violations, breach of contract, negligence, and unlawful eviction tied to their suspensions. The case remained pending as of mid-2026, complicated by a judge’s warning that plaintiffs’ counsel had cited AI-generated, fictitious case law in filings.³⁶ Khalil and seven anonymous students also sought to block Columbia from sharing protester information with the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, arguing that federal funding threats were being used to coerce identification of protesters and chill protected speech. In April 2025, a federal judge denied the temporary restraining order but ordered Columbia to notify plaintiffs before sharing additional information with Congress.³⁷

Did Columbia Divest?

No. Columbia’s Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing rejected a CUAD divestment proposal in February 2024 and three more in December 2024, finding that the proposals failed to show the “broad consensus” across the university community that Columbia’s divestment standards require, and citing implementation difficulties related to global supply chains.³⁸ No U.S. university committed to divest from Israel during the 2024 protest wave.³⁹

What did change were Columbia’s protest rules. Protests are now banned inside and immediately outside academic buildings. Demonstrators must show university ID when asked, and masks worn to conceal identity during policy violations are prohibited. The university adopted a policy of institutional neutrality on issues outside its core mission and hired 36 new special officers with authority to remove individuals or make arrests. These measures are overseen in part by the independent monitor appointed under the federal settlement.⁴⁰⁴¹

Beyond Columbia, the NYPD’s April 18 raid set off solidarity encampments on more than 100 campuses nationwide, with over 1,600 arrests at roughly 30 schools by early May.²³⁴²⁴³ The protest born on Columbia’s South Lawn produced the largest campus protest wave in a generation; the demand that launched it was refused, and the university that hosted it was transformed.

1
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NPR. Here Are the Divestment Demands That Student Protesters Are Making
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U.S. Congress. House Education and Workforce Committee Hearing Transcript
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CNN. Columbia University Protesters Trespass Dismissed
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ABC 7 NY. Judge Dismisses 30 Cases of Criminal Trespass
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Columbia Spectator. Pro-Palestinian Student Protesters Sue Columbia Alleging Title VI Violations and Negligence
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PBS NewsHour. Police Fire Flash Bangs, Detain Protesters as They Dismantle Pro-Palestinian Encampment at UCLA