Feds arrest a second Columbia protester

(JTA) — Immigration authorities have arrested a second Palestinian involved in protests at Columbia University, the Department of Homeland Security announced on Friday.

A third person who was involved in pro-Palestinian protests at the school, a current graduate student, “self-deported” earlier this week after having her visa revoked, according to the department.

The announcement comes as Columbia reels from both the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian protest leader with a green card, and the loss of $400 million in federal funding as retaliation for last year’s pro-Palestinian protests.

A flurry of developments from both the school and the federal government on Thursday amounted a hammer falling on the pro-Palestinian protest groups that, for the past 17 months, have made the New York City Ivy League school the epicenter of student demonstrations over Israel and Gaza, and raised the alarm over campus antisemitism.

Students were suspended and expelled. Federal agents searched campus. And the Trump administration outlined its demands for the school to be able to recoup the $400 million in federal grants canceled last week — including further constraining protesters and empowering police.

Critics of the demands call them the latest attack on student activism, while some Jewish groups are praising the actions as a sign that the university is taking threats to Jewish students seriously.

“Columbia continues to make every effort to ensure that our campus, students, faculty, and staff are safe,” Katrina Armstrong, Columbia’s interim president, wrote in a Thursday night email to students about the federal agents. “Columbia is committed to upholding the law, and we expect city, state, and federal agencies to do the same.”

She added, “I understand the immense stress our community is under.”

The first wave of news on Thursday concerned perhaps the single highest-profile event at Columbia last year: the forcible student occupation of a university building that led to an NYPD raid and dozens of arrests. It was the culmination of the pro-Palestinian encampment movement that began at Columbia and spread to schools across the country.

On Thursday, nearly 11 months later, Columbia announced in a brief message that it had “issued sanctions to students ranging from multi-year suspensions, temporary degree revocations, and expulsions related to the occupation of Hamilton Hall last spring.”

It didn’t detail how many students got each penalty, or who they were, but that news soon surfaced: Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the pro-Palestinian group leading many of the protests, tweeted that 22 students had been expelled, suspended or had their degrees revoked.

So far, two of them have been named: Grant Miner, who heads a union chapter representing 3,000 undergraduate and graduate students employed at the school, and Aidan Parisi, a pro-Palestinian activist.

One pro-Israel user on X went viral after tweeting “Shalom, Aidan,” adopting President Donald Trump’s new use of the Hebrew greeting as a threat. The director of Columbia Hillel, Brian Cohen, praised the expulsions as an indication of the school’s changing attitude.

“This ruling is an important first step in righting the wrongs of the past year and a half,” he said. “I am grateful to the Rules Administrator and other members of the Administration for their roles in ensuring these cases were resolved.”

Miner’s local is part of UAW, a large national union that has called for the United States to halt its military aid to Israel and that condemned the expulsions.

“As the UAW has emphasized, the assault on First Amendment rights being jointly committed by the federal government and Columbia University are an attack on all workers who dare to protest, speak out, or exercise their freedom of association under the US Constitution,” UAW said in a statement on Miner that called the punishments an attempt to unfreeze the grant money.

Shortly afterward, the U.S. government made clear that the school needed to do more to get the grant money back. A letter from the General Services Administration and the education and health and human services departments demanded a list of changes in return for the grants, most of which went to health and science research and which are due to cause job cuts at the school.

The letter, first reported by the Free Press, demanded that Columbia more stringently detail and enforce its rules around student protests, give the school president more power over disciplinary decisions, expand the authority of campus police and create a plan to “hold all student groups accountable” that have violated school by-laws.

It also demanded that the school:

Ban masks at protests, which has become a central cause of a coalition of Jewish groups and other civil rights organizations.

Adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, a widely adopted yet controversial document that defines some criticism of Israel as antisemitic.

Place the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under special supervision for five years.

“We expect your immediate compliance with these critical next steps, after which we hope to open a conversation about immediate and long-term structural reforms that will return Columbia to its original mission of innovative research and academic excellence,” the letter said.

And soon after that news broke, Armstrong sent another message to the school. Five days after Khalil’s arrest, DHS agents had entered and searched campus with a warrant — though no arrests were made there.

The next day, the department announced that it had arrested Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian from the West Bank, for overstaying a student visa that had been terminated in 2022. Kordia was arrested in April 2024 in relation to the “pro-Hamas protests at Columbia,” the press release said. It did not say whether Kordia had been a student at Columbia or what, if any, crime she had been charged with.

In another case, a current graduate student from India on a visa left the country voluntarily on Tuesday, according to the department. Ranjani Srinivasan used the department’s new “self-deport” option on its app to convey her decision to leave the country. Her on-campus housing was searched on Thursday, her lawyer told the New York Times.

“It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America. When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country,” DHS Secretary Kirsti Noem said in a statement. “I am glad to see one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathizers use the CBP Home app to self-deport.”