The Tartan

By Adrien Marenco

On Friday evening, hundreds of University of Pittsburgh students and Pittsburgh community members led a pro-Palestinian demonstration through Oakland. The crowd was escorted by several police officers in cars and on motorcycles on their march down Fifth Ave, the traffic blockaded by police vehicles and biking protesters. Many of the protesters wore face masks, sunglasses, and hoods, anonymously displaying signs and banners against genocide and ethnic cleansing. 

The demonstration was in response to the recent ICE arrest and attempted deportation of a Columbia University graduate, 30 year-old Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil, a green card holder, was a primary leader of the Columbia student pro-Palestine encampment in 2023. President Trump labeled the ICE raid as “the first arrest of many to come” in a Truth Social post on March 10, describing the student protests in response to the war as “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.” 

Much of the discussion about Khalil’s detainment has centered around the content of his activism — particularly, the fact that Karoline Leavitt, the white house press secretary, claimed that Khalil had distributed “pro-Hamas propaganda fliers with the logo of Hamas.” No evidence of such flyers has been produced, with Leavitt failing to bring one of these flyers, which were reportedly on her desk, to the press conference on Khalil’s detainment. 

Friday’s demonstrators and other activists speaking out in support of Khalil have urged that, regardless of the content of his protests, his detainment sets a dangerous and deeply unconstitutional precedent for the treatment of student protesters and free speech in the new administration. One of the speakers at Friday’s demonstration stated that “Khalil’s story is one of resilience and intellect,” and that his detainment is “a warning shot to every student and every person that dares to challenge power.”

The protest effort was aided by Not On Our Dime!, a New York-based group which defines its purpose as working to end New York state support for Israeli violent settlement through a 2023-proposed piece of legislation entitled “Not on our dime!: Ending New York funding of Israeli settler violence act,” or bill A6943A/S06992A in the assembly and senate, respectively. According to the group’s website, the act would “[take] on the issue of charitable status for organizations that support illegal activities“ by prohibiting not-for-profit entities from aiding Israeli settlement activity. The act would also allow the Attorney General to both strip charitable status and fine organizations in violation a minimum of $1 million. The organization introduced the legislation in May 2023, about six months before the Oct. 7 attack. 

The United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) tracked that over 4000 Palestinians were displaced throughout 2023, a historically high number defined by OCHA as the result of “settler violence and access restriction.” The Not On Our Dime! website labels this time “the most violent year on record for Palestinians in the West Bank,” and reworked the legislation in 2024 to “ensure that, at the bare minimum, [New York] state cannot classify financial support for war crimes as tax-advantaged charitable giving.” The legislation holds that “a certain class of activities are fundamentally inconsistent with a charitable purpose,” particularly the support for war crimes deemed illegal under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, as well as the treaties signed at Geneva in 1949.