Students occupying Columbia building face expulsion, university says

We arrived at the University of Texas at Austin shortly after lunchtime, where a small group of around 40 or 50 people was protesting against the war in Gaza.

Some wore Palestinian keffiyehs, others held handwritten signs calling on the university to divest from arms to Israel. They sat on the lawn and held a question-and-answer session among their group, including some faculty members, on topics from the jailing of demonstrators to the right to free speech.

The site is now clear of tents and tables after the university administration called in Texas state troopers on Monday. Riot police armed with batons, bolt cutters and pepper spray moved in on the encampment, dragging people away and making more than 100 arrests, according to local media.

“We were receiving a show of violence by the police,” said one of the demonstrators who asked that his name was not published.

“They started picking people off one by one, arresting them, throwing them on the ground, pulling them by their legs, their hair, their shirt. They pulled everybody out,” he told me.

As tensions mounted on Monday, the Republican Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, weighed in, saying: “No encampments will be allowed… instead, arrests are being made.”

Some 50 people are still being held by police, according to protesters. They accuse the university authorities of helping facilitate a violent crackdown on free speech. University officials blame demonstrators for escalating tensions by ignoring calls to remove the encampment – a claim the protesters reject. UT Austin said many present on Monday were not from the university.

Near the protest today a smaller group of counter-demonstrators stood at the edge of the lawn, each wrapped in an Israeli flag. The site has been mostly calm aside from a few isolated moments of friction between the two groups.