Columbia faculty groups sue US administration over crackdown on anti-Israel activity
Union also seeks court order against deportation of non-citizen activists; separate suit by Oct. 7 victims accuses protesters of spreading Hamas propaganda, knowing ahead of time about attack
Groups representing Columbia University professors on Tuesday sued the administration of US President Donald Trump over its effort to force the Manhattan university to tighten rules on campus protests and put a Middle Eastern studies department under outside oversight, among other measures.
Faculty groups also filed a separate lawsuit Tuesday seeking to block the Trump administration from deporting non-citizen anti-Israel campus activists, following the arrest earlier this month of Columbia graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States.
Meanwhile, nine US and Israeli citizens who were victims of the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023 — including relatives of people murdered or taken hostage, and two people affiliated with Columbia who reported mistreatment there — sued organizers of the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests on Monday, accusing them of serving as Hamas’s “propaganda arm” and having prior knowledge of the terror group’s shock assault. The defendants included Khalil.
All three lawsuits were filed in Manhattan federal court.
In one of the lawsuits on Tuesday, the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation accused the Trump administration of trying to force the university’s hand by canceling $400 million in federal funding and threatening to withhold billions more in the future.
The plaintiffs said the lawsuit “challenges the Trump administration’s unlawful and unprecedented effort to overpower a university’s academic autonomy and control the thought, association, scholarship, and expression of its faculty and students.”
“The Trump administration is coercing Columbia University to do its bidding and regulate speech and expression on campus by holding hostage billions of dollars in congressionally authorized federal funding – funding that is responsible for positioning the American university system as a global leader in scientific, medical, and technological research and is crucial to ensuring it remains so,” they said.
Columbia has been a focal point of anti-Israel activity since thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel on October 7, 2023, to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, triggering the ongoing Gaza war.
The Trump administration has accused the university of having antisemitic harassment on campus and demanded that it place one specific department — Middle East, South Asia, and Africa Studies — into academic receivership, an unusual move where university administrators take control away from the faculty at a department that has been deemed dysfunctional. The Trump administration declined to specify evidence of its claims.
Critics of the Trump administration have said that the receivership demand did not provide constitutional, statutory or regulatory authority and is meant to punish scholars in the department for views that the Trump administration does not like.
Columbia has already partly acquiesced to the administration’s demands in an effort to regain funding, saying it had already begun hiring security with arrest powers, that it was working to hire new faculty with joint positions in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the School for International and Public Affairs, as well as hire a new administrator to review the leadership and balance of Middle Eastern programs.
The actions against Columbia have created a “pervasive climate of fear and self-censorship” not only at its New York City campus but at universities around the country fearing retaliation from the administration, the lawsuit said, adding the actions chilled speech, threatened academic freedom and that students from all backgrounds should be protected from harassment.
It is asking the court to order the administration to restore the $400 million in canceled grants and contracts and to block it from taking any action to enforce its demands.
Also on Tuesday, the AAUP and other academic associations sued for a court order barring the Trump administration from deporting or threatening students based on their political views.
The lawsuit said the arrest of Khalil and Trump’s threat of further arrests had “created a climate of repression and fear on university campuses.”
Khalil, who was born and raised in a refugee camp in Syria, entered the US on a student visa in 2022 and became a legal permanent resident in 2024. A federal judge last week ruled that he must remain in the United States for now.
Khalil was a leading member of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which has endorsed “armed resistance” against Israel and called “for the total eradication of Western civilization.”
The Trump administration claimed after Khalil’s arrest that he had withheld his previous work for UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, in his visa application, saying that was grounds for his deportation.
UNRWA has said Khalil was briefly an unpaid intern. Israel has accused the aid agency of serving as a front for Hamas, and at least one Israeli hostage has reported having been held in an UNWRA facility in Gaza.
Both Columbia faculty lawsuits accuse the Trump administration of trampling on the right to free speech under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
For its part, the US Justice Department said it “makes no apologies for its efforts to defend President Trump’s agenda in court and protect Jewish Americans from vile antisemitism.” Columbia, which is not a party in either lawsuit, did not respond to a request for comment.
Anti-Israel protesters accused of acting as ‘PR firm’ for Hamas
In a lawsuit filed Monday, people behind the anti-Israel demonstrations at Columbia were accused of having coordinated their efforts with Hamas to further its attacks since 2023.
Besides Khalil, the defendants include Within Our Lifetime-United for Palestine, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (“CSJP”), Columbia-Barnard Jewish Voice for Peace, and some of the groups’ leaders.
The civil lawsuit accuses the defendants of violating US antiterrorism legislation and the law of nations and seeks unspecified compensatory, punitive and triple damages.
“It would be illegal for Hamas to directly retain a public relations firm in the United States or hire enforcers to impose their will on American cities.” the complaint said. “Yet those are precisely the services that the [defendant groups] knowingly provide to Hamas.”
The plaintiffs also accused some group defendants “on information and belief” of having prior knowledge of the Hamas attack. They cited the timing and substance of statements made shortly before, during and after the atrocities occurred, including a CSJP post on Instagram three minutes before the attack that said “We are back!!”
The defendants or lawyers who have represented them in Columbia-related litigation did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mark Goldfeder, a lawyer at the National Jewish Advocacy Center representing the plaintiffs, said in an email that the defendants’ coordinating activities with Hamas were known because they have said so repeatedly.
“There is nothing wrong with being pro-Palestinian, and pro-Hamas speech is still protected speech in most contexts,” he said. “The issue here is the material support of and coordination with a designated foreign terrorist organization.”
The Times of Israel Community.