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US campus protests: police arrest dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Columbia university

Police officers in riot gear arrested dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Columbia University in Manhattan on Tuesday night and cleared a building that protesters had seized about 20 hours earlier.

Columbia said it had called the police to campus for the second time in less than two weeks after the building, Hamilton Hall, was “vandalized and blockaded.” The university’s president, Nemat Shafik, asked the N.Y.P.D. to maintain a presence on campus through at least May 17 to prevent further encampments or occupations.

The occupation escalated a crisis that has consumed the university and ignited days of student activism on dozens of campuses nationwide. On Tuesday night, pro-Palestinian demonstrators were arrested at City College of New York in Harlem, and the University of California, Los Angeles, declared a pro-Palestinian encampment illegal for the first time.

  • Nearly two weeks ago, the police arrested more than 100 protesters who had set up tents on Columbia’s campus. That angered many faculty members and students, who almost immediately pitched new tents.
  • Columbia’s campus remained closed on Wednesday to everyone but students who live there and employees who provide essential services. It said it would expel any students who had occupied Hamilton Hall, a building with a history of student takeovers.
  • Officials at Portland State University in Oregon urged protesters to leave a library that they had occupied on campus. And the police moved into an encampment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, arresting about 30 people. Protesters returned later in the day.
  • The police managed to end the eight-day occupation of an administration building at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, and in Rhode Island, Brown students dismantled their encampmentafter administrators agreed to consider their demands.
  • More than 1,000 protesters have been taken into custody on U.S. campuses since the original roundup at Columbia on April 18, according to a tally by The New York Times. M