On a recent spring afternoon, a handful of former and current Columbia students chained themselves to the locked campus gates while demanding that the university cut ties with Israel and companies profiting off of its war in Gaza.
A small crowd cheered on the direct action, but the whole gathering was modest in size compared to the sea of students who’d flooded Columbia’s lawns just over a year ago, camping out for two weeks straight while spurring similar demonstrations nationwide.
Student protesters continued to occupy part of Columbia University, April 23, 2024. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY
Among the supporters this April was 23-year-old Maryam Alwan, a Palestinian-American comparative literature student fast approaching graduation who’d played a key role in the campus demonstrations a year earlier.
Her close friend Mahmoud Khalil is now being held in a jail in Louisiana as the government seeks his deportation, part of a crackdown by the Trump administration on pro-Palestinian protesters, targeting Columbia especially, that has driven some non-citizen students students into hiding.
But even before the Trump administration reversed course last week on using a federal database to abruptly terminate student visas, often without informing them or their schools, Alwan said she felt campus movement against the war in Gaza remained vital.
“Even though it feels hopeless right now, it shows that actually we are powerful,” she said. “If the state is desperate enough to start violating our own Constitution in order to quell dissent to their investment in genocide, then that’s a show of our power.”
‘Everything Is Hardened’
A year of protests, and now the Trump administration’s response to them, have shaken New York City’s only Ivy League university to its core.
An institution which had just 24 presidents, including acting ones, between 1754 and 2019, is now on its third president and second acting one since 2023. The university has struggled to respond to pro-Palestinian student protesters and demands from House Republicans and now the Trump administration that it do more to crack down on them for disrupting campus life and alleged antisemitism.
The school’s once open main campus has been blocked off to the public for more than a year. International students have feared attending classes in person lest they get picked off by ICE, while a newly-deputized campus police force is now empowered to detain and arrest students.
“They turned it into a fortress. Everything is hardened,” said Jonathan Ben-Menachem, a PhD student in sociology, who is part of the student worker union that was involved in organizing efforts last year. “It feels kind of dead to me now.”
An entrance to Columbia University was padlocked a year after pro-Palestine protests shut down the campus, April 18, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY
Over the past month and a half, at least three current and former noncitizen student activists have been detained and are being held in ICE custody: Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi and Leqaa Kordia. None has been charged with any crime.
The Trump administration is arguing in legal filings that Khalil’s beliefs constitute a national security threat and aren’t protected by the First Amendment because he isn’t a citizen. Last week, Khalil missed the birth of his first son.
At least two other Columbia students who played more peripheral roles in pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations have had their visas revoked by Trump’s State Department – Yunseo Chung, who is in hiding and Ranjani Srinivasan who fled the country.
The revocations have sent shockwaves across campus, particularly for international students who make up 13,000 of 35,000 of the university’s total enrollment.
“Our international students are afraid to come to campus” for classes and lab work “because they’re afraid that because of their involvement last year they’ll be taken away by ICE,” said one research professor, who asked that her identity be withheld fearing professional and immigration consequences.
“Some of them are coming out anyway, but they just have a lot of anxiety about it,” she said.
Facing a series of court injunctions, the Trump administration reversed course last week and restored some student records even as officials vowed to find other ways to oust students with academic visas.
‘The Darkest Chapter’
Other big universities, like Harvard, have mounted legal challenges against the Trump administration’s threats to pull federal funding, and some like Tufts have denounced the abduction of its students by federal authorities.
Columbia, though, quickly acquiesced to a number of Trump administration demands as it began cutting off federal funding to the university. Even more jarring, students and faculty members said that the university has yet to mention Khalil or any of the other detained or targeted non-citizen students by name in more than a month since his arrest.
“Columbia’s mascot deserves a new name, the cowardly Lion,” Michael Thaddeus, a mathematics professor and vice president of the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, jeered at a recent rally of dozens of professors from city universities at Foley Square.
Columbia University mathematics professor Michael Thaddeus joined a protest in Lower Manhattan against the Trump administration’s attempts to deport students, April 17, 2025. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
The union, rather than the university itself, has sued the Trump Administration on behalf of faculty over funding cuts.
“No one feels more attached to Columbia University than I do,” Thaddeus said, going on to note he was born and raised in Morningside Heights and had taught at Columbia for almost 30 years.
“I’m proud of the great things Columbia’s faculty and students have accomplished in its 271 year history,” he said, adding, “the last month has been the darkest chapter in that history.”
One Israeli-American former PhD student, who was among those who sued Columbia a year earlier, arguing it wasn’t coming down hard enough on antisemitism on campus, said he was concerned by the Trump administration’s move.
“I don’t think blackmailing [Columbia] over funding, especially funding that’s going towards science, something that has absolutely nothing to do with what’s going on,” the 28-year-old former student said, who asked for anonymity, wanting to distance himself from the tumult of the prior year.
He dropped out of his Phd program because of the ongoing protests. But if he hadn’t, funding for the research project he was working on was among grants cut by the Trump administration, meaning he would have likely have lost his position anyway.
“I don’t think those are the correct steps,” he said. “It just doesn’t really make sense.”
The day after the funding revocation, Khalil was snatched by federal agents inside his Columbia University housing who entered without showing a warrant while ICE agents roved around Morningside Heights, looking for others.
Then came one March 13 letter from Trump demanding a series of changes from Columbia administrators.
Columbia quickly capitulated— announcing the same day it received Trump’s letter it was expelling students involved in the occupation of Hamilton Hall a year earlier. Two weeks after that, in an announcement called “Fulfilling our Commitments” the university said it was hiring 36 “special officers who will have the ability to remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them.”
A university spokesperson, who declined to give their name, said that “The additional capabilities of these Public Safety officers to remove individuals from campus, issue citations and make arrests, if necessary and appropriate, will allow us to respond more effectively to campus disruptions.”
While several other universities in New York City have similar arrangements, including CUNY, Julliard, and Fordham University, the move was at odds with the university’s history and sentiment on campus. In February, a University Senate poll of nearly 13,000 students found 60% percent said they would feel “less safe” if police were allowed back onto campus, Columbia Spectator reported.
The “commitments” also included a ban on face masks except for religious or health reasons and barred protests from taking place inside campus buildings because of the “likelihood of disrupting academic activities.”
‘A Hard Ask’
Residents of Morningside Heights surrounding the campus are feeling the fallout as well. Before last spring, Columbia’s campus, lawns and gardens were open to the surrounding neighbors, via a cut through on 116th street known as College Walk.
The campus has been blocked off to the public almost entirely for the past year. For some residents that means a walk twice as long to get to the nearest 1 train subway stop on 116th street, which is a major disruptor for people with mobility issues.
“It’s one of those things that many people didn’t really appreciate until they didn’t have it,” said Toby Golick, a lawyer who lives nearby and is representing a group of her neighbors in a state lawsuit urging the university to reopen its gates. “But it’s as if they closed the whole section of Central Park and you lived across from the park. It’s been an ongoing inconvenience.”
Asked about the closures, the Columbia spokesperson said that We are focused on ensuring that all of our students feel welcome, safe, and secure on our campus as we also balance the desire for an open campus that is accessible to all of Columbia’s valued constituencies, including our neighbors.”
The university’s 1953 agreement with the city allows the university to block 116th Street off to cars states that “free and unhampered access shall at all times be retained by the City over volume of the street.” But lawyers for the city argued in court this month that the street had never been public at all, the New York Post reported.
But with ICE targeting students, Robert Newton, a lecturer on sustainability science, said some professors are reconsidering the request.
“It’s a hard ask to say open the gates and in the next breath, keep ICE off campus,” he said.
Columbia University lecturer Robert Newton took part in a Lower Manhattan protest against President Donald Trump, April 17, 2025. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Newton joined dozens of faculty members from Columbia, CUNY, NYU, the New School in marching from Washington Square Park to Foley Square on a recent afternoon to call for the release of detained students and the restoration of academic funding.
“It’s easy to be angry at the Columbia administration, which you’d have to say has been at best feckless in trying to defend the university, but the animus here is from Washington,” he said.
“Universities teach critical thinking. We teach history and memory and theory and we’re centers of — look around you — of activism,” he said, gesturing to the crowd gathered. “They can’t allow us to go on.”
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