The New York Police Department has made multiple arrests after dozens of activists swarmed Trump Tower to protest the immigration detention of a Columbia University activist.
Chaotic scenes showed NYPD officers dragging out members of the group Jewish Voice for Peace on Thursday.
Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident who is married to an American citizen and who hasn't been charged with breaking any laws, was arrested outside his New York City apartment on Saturday and faces deportation.
President Donald Trump has said Khalil’s arrest was the first “of many to come” and vowed on social media to deport students who he said engage in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.”
However, Khalil’s supporters say his arrest is an attack on free speech, and protests have been staged elsewhere in New York City and around the country. Hundreds demonstrated Wednesday outside a Manhattan courthouse during a brief hearing on his case.
At Thursday’s Trump Tower protest, police, who were staged inside and outside the Fifth Avenue building, just off Central Park, ahead of the demonstration, began arresting protesters after warning them to leave.
The demonstrators – who wore red shirts reading “Jews say stop arming Israel” and carried banners reading “Opposing fascism is a Jewish tradition” and “Fight Nazis not students” – chanted “Bring Mahmoud home now!"
Video showed demonstrators being escorted out of the building by police with their hands cuffed behind their backs, and later being loaded onto city buses. However, despite some more vocal protests, most remained calm and were escorted out in an orderly fashion.
Out of the crowd of roughly 300 demonstrators, 98 were arrested, according to The New York Post.
“Those arrests are for trespassing, obstructing government administration, and resisting arrest by virtue of us having to carry some of the people out of the escalator, which you saw,” NYPD Chief of Department John Chell said.
“We gave warnings on our pager system and once we did that warning three times, the NYPD with its professionalism, as you saw, went in and made the arrests, there were no injuries. There were no incidents. There was no damaged property.”
The Independent has reached out to the White House for comment about the protests at Trump Tower.
Khalil, 30, is being detained at an immigration detention center more than 1,300 miles away in Louisiana, though a district judge temporarily halted his removal from the U.S. on Monday.
Columbia University was a focal point of the pro-Palestinian protest movement that swept across U.S. college campuses last year and led to more than 2,000 arrests.Khalil, whose wife is pregnant with their first child, finished his requirements for a Columbia master’s degree in December.
Born in Syria, he is a grandson of Palestinians who were forced to leave their homeland, his lawyers said in a legal filing.
Khalil had been “identified, targeted, detained and is being processed for deportation on account of his advocacy for Palestinian rights,” Ramzi Kassem, an attorney with the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project at CUNY School of Law, said at Wednesday’s hearing.
His detention in Louisiana has “severely limited” his attorneys’ access to him, Kassem told the judge.
In addition to the widespread protests from civil rights groups, Khalil’s arrest has been widely condemned by Democratic officials, who have questioned how a legal permanent resident could be deported, without facing any criminal charges, and without any evidence from the government of the allegations against him or any other demonstrators.
Administration officials have argued that Khalil doesn’t need to be charged, let alone convicted of a crime, to be removed from the country, alleging without evidence he was “aligned with Hamas” thus providing material support to a terrorist organization.
Additional reporting from Alex Woodward and Richard Hall.
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