On May 5th, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel dropped felony charges against seven protestors involved in last year’s encampment on the Univeristy of Michigian (U of M) campus aganist the genocide in Gaza. In the same week, U of M president Santa J. Ono resigned and took a new position at University of Florida. In explaining her reasoning for dropping the charges, Nessel noted that the cases had become “a lightning rod of contention.” 

This is a win for the movement and shows the difference that collective resistance can make. Not only can protests and campaigns against repression be effective strategically, they can serve as the basis for the fight to build a strong movement that includes the strategic power of the working class. They show why we need to fight — to keep the movement alive. And they show why a militant defense of democratic demands can build the collective experience we need to grow stronger as a movement of international solidarity.  

Encampments as a Flashpoint

As encampments spread across the country and world last spring in the biggest student uprising since the anti Vietnam War demonstrations, universities and colleges cracked down. On many campuses, the administrations invited police raids to break up and demolish the student encampments, complete with livestreams and news reports of many violent arrests of students and faculty. In other cases, the administrations were able to negotiate with protestors and get them to leave on their own. Many university administrations brought criminal charges against those protesting the genocide. 

While most of those charges were dropped within a couple of months, by the spring of 2025 some charges still remained: seven felonies from U of M; twelve felonies from Stanford; and eight felonies from the City University of New York (CUNY). There have also been recent arrests at Columbia University, Brooklyn College, and Rutgers. One thing that’s notable about both U of M and CUNY is these are both public universities that leaned into their public character to encourage community support. At both schools the protesters facing felony charges were mainly people who came from the community rather than people directly part of the university. 

This repression of the movement in the U.S. is mirrored abroad, as seen in the case of Anasse Kazib: railway worker, union activist, and spokesman for Révolution Permanente (RP) (part of the International Network La Izquierda Diario (LID) in France) whom the French state has decided to prosecute for a tweet in support of the Palestinian people, along with another RP activist.

By employing the violence of the state, the ruling class was mostly able to stamp out the encampments, demobilize the movement, and keep us from reviving it. Especially when school was going to be starting up in the fall, Biden and the university administrations kept the level of repression high, which set the stage for Trump to then escalate further. Trump continued and expanded Biden’s repression against the Palestinian liberation movement, using it to bolster his broad attacks on immigrants and “wokeness.” 

With this twisted combination, masked ICE officers have arrested multiple pro-Palestine students, visa-holders, grabbing them from their homes, like Mahmoud Khail. Him, along with others, are currently under detention as political prisoners. 

Universities like Columbia caving to Trump’s dictates also provided cover for a disciplining of the labor movement, especially evident in the firing and expulsion of Student Workers of Columbia (SWC) union president Grant Miner. Miner is also a prominent Jewish voice denouncing these attacks on democratic rights and exposing how Trump and Columbia alike have been weaponizing false definitions of antisemitism to support the Zionist project. 

At this point, Trump’s audacious attacks have garnered enough pushback that he has had to backtrack. After kidnapping Khalil and Özturk, the administration proceeded to cancel hundreds of student visas. They even challenged the protections guaranteed by a green card. But the public outburst was severe — and the Trump administration reinstated the visas, making clear they still intended to proceed with their attacks but would need a more legally secure basis. 

This shows that the state couldn’t just end the movement by co-opting it back into the fold of electoralism and had to resort to the armed wing of the state and courts to suppress the movement. This is a bipartisan affair. In pursuing charges against the U of M encampment, Attorney General Nessel, a “progressive Democrat,” who stood up for reproductive rights and slapped back Trump’s unconstitutional attacks, was hawkishly going on the attack against the movement — in fact, doing Trump’s dirty work; it is also worth noting that she was the only AG to do this. Recently Nessel sent for FBI raids in multiple cities in Michigan against pro-Palestine activists, making it clear how close the Democrats are to Republicans on key issues. They are in an alliance to keep capitalism and US hegemony intact, even if that means trampling our civil rights and targeting violence against workers, community members, and students. Militant resistance from the Left is needed to pull back on this rightward swing. 

Nessel did not drop the charges out of the kindness of her own heart. She was facing “months of mounting political pressure from the progressive wing of her own party,” according to the Detroit Metro Times, including a protest that disrupted Nessel taking the stage at February’s Michigan Democratic Party Convention in Detroit. With growing dissent from the Left, Nessel concluded, “I no longer believe these cases to be a prudent use of my department’s resources.” This was a tactical retreat, as there is no way the Democrats could take on Trump in the midterm elections as being the defenders of our rights while carrying out unfounded punishment to repress the free speech of students. If Trump had to back down on the student visas, the Democrats would look worse continuing with these charges.   

Fight Against Repression Must Continue Uniting Our Struggles 

The movement for Palestinian liberation can only be won on an international basis. We stand in solidarity with the Palestinians being persecuted by Israel to the point of forced starvation in Gaza and the West Bank; and we resist Zionist oppression in our local struggles for freedom of speech and freedom of assembly in the bowels of the imperial core. 

Our struggles are inextricably linked. Building and protecting the movement within the U.S. and other imperialist countries — challenging the funders of genocide at home — is key to strengthening the level of resistance possible within Palestine, across the sea. We must fight for the abundance of food that international workers produce daily under capitalism to get through the war zone, into the mouths of the Palestinians that Israel is now cruelly starving out; just as we must fight for the right to protest imperialism itself and assemble forces to build the strength to overthrow this racist, patriarchal system from the inside out. As a global community, we must join our struggles and link the working class and oppressed across borders. We don’t want genocide to ever benefit anybody. If we learn to strike strategically, with all our might, we can win freedom for workers and the oppressed to infuse this spirit in a plan for a socialist international system.

With this victory of getting the charges dropped at U of M, the movement can see that the state is not invincible and can be combated — by joining students, faculty, and the community in a united struggle for Palestine, linked nationally with other struggles of the working class and oppressed. Trump does not have a mandate, and his attacks against democratic rights have received considerable push back. The more we push back as a united force, the more Trump will have to moderate the administration’s attacks. Due to determined struggle, the Democratic Party had to pull back their attacks against the movement in order to seem like a viable alternative to Trump. This opens for the movement a little more space in order to unite our fight — a strategy that can win, as we celebrate in getting the felonies dropped at U of M. 

Now we have a moment to strengthen the movement nationally and internationally. This can be done through open democratic discussion with the rank and file sectors of the movement, students and workers, including through mass assemblies and public meetings to discuss the current situation and debate what to do moving forward. We must find ways to connect and share about the processes and conclusions of our struggles along the way. By utilizing our strength in numbers and our creativity, we continue the next battle of the fight: secure the release the Rutgers protestor from jail, drop the Rutgers charges, drop the CUNY 8 charges, drop the charges against Anasse Kazib; and at the same time we must tighten our ranks to ready for any future repression that will certainly be targeting the movement.