Around 100 demonstrators have been arrested after flooding Trump Tower in New York City shouting, ‘Fight Nazi, not students’, in protest of a pro-Palestinian activist’s detention.
Protesters with Jewish Voice for Peace chanted ‘Free Mahmoud, Free them All!’ while taking over the lobby of the hotel on Thursday morning.
More than 200 protesters gathered in support of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, who is facing deportation.
Many of the protesters wore red shirts with the lettering in white: ‘Not in our name’ and ‘Jews say stop arming Israel’.
They held large white banners stating, ‘Free Mahmoud, Free Palestine’ and ‘Jews say do not comply’.
The protesters filled the gold-tinted ground floor of the hotel by Trump Grill as observers recorded the chaotic scene from higher floors.
Cops outside the Fifth Avenue hotel had warned demonstrators to leave or risk arrest.
Among the hundreds of protesters was actor Debra Winger.
‘I’m just standing up for my rights, and I’m standing up for Mahmoud Khalil, who has been abducted illegally and taken to an undisclosed location,’ she said.
‘Does that sound like America to you?’
Winger claimed that the Trump administration is ‘co-opting antisemitism’ and has ‘no interest in Jewish safety’.
One video showed three protesters in red shirts being escorted out by police officers.
About an hour after the protest broke out, at least 65 activists were restrained in zip ties and put into a police vehicle and city bus.
By shortly before 1pm, the majority of protesters had been cleared out of the hotel.
The New York Police Department arrested at least 98 protesters in the lobby.
Kaz Daughtry, the Deputy mayor for public safety, Kaz Daughtry, said that no one was hurt and that the city will go over procedures because ‘this cannot happen again’.
An onlooker, Nina Levene, 60, standing across the street from the hotel called the demonstrations ‘anti-American’ and said that Khalil was ‘breaking every rule’.
‘When we take people into this country, they have to promise that they’re not anti our government and anti our democracy,’ Levene, whose mom is a Holocaust survivor, told NBC News.
Khalil, 30, was one of the main orchestrators of pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia last year. Similar demonstrations were subsequently held at other colleges across the US.
The green card holder and US permanent resident was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on Saturday night in his apartment in front of his pregnant wife.
President Donald Trump has labeled Khalil a terrorist sympathizer.
A Trump administration document stated that Khalil is ‘subject to removal from the United States’.
‘The Secretary of State has determined that your presence or activities in the United States would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,’ read the documented seen by NBC News.
Columbia warned students and faculty that that they could be subject to a crackdown by the administration.
‘Nobody can protect you,’ said journalism school’s dean, Jelani Cobb .
‘These are dangerous times.’
The US president did not immediately remark on the protest at his hotel on his Truth Social platform.
Trump previously said that Khalil’s arrest is the first ‘of many to come’. He wrote on social media that students involved in ‘pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity’ will be deported.
Jewish Voice for Peace on its website stated that ‘the detention of Mahmoud is further proof that we are on the brink of a full takeover by a repressive, authoritarian regime’.
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Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan has previously experienced protests from groups for and against him, but most have been staged outside. The multi-level atrium including the lobby has restaurants and shops and is open to the public.
Khalil’s supporters held a demonstration in Lower Manhattan earlier this week.
He is being held at an immigration detention facility in Louisiana. His deportation has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge as the court considers a challenge.
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