A dozen Columbia University faculty and staff members and students were taken into custody on Thursday after blocking traffic on Broadway for nearly an hour as they protested President Trump’s immigration crackdown and demanded that Columbia provide more protections for international students.
The arrests of the protesters, who sat in a crosswalk and wore matching shirts that said “Sanctuary Campus Now,” took place just before 4 p.m. after repeated warnings from police officers. The calm and deliberate police action was a marked contrast from the overwhelming show of force and rows of riot police that often met protesters outside Columbia during the past two years.
Mila Rosenthal, 58, an adjunct professor of international and public affairs, was among those who chose to be arrested as an act of civil disobedience.
“We’re seeing what’s happening in Minneapolis, just all of that terror that ICE is sowing there,” she said before her arrest, referring to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. “And there’s no reason that Columbia can’t say, ‘This ends here.’”
A sizable percentage of the student body at Columbia comes from outside the United States, and she said Columbia needed to do more to make those students feel safe. “This is a terrifying time to be in the United States, no matter your visa status, and they feel very vulnerable,” she said.
The protest, which attracted about 150 people at its height, was organized in part by a group of faculty and staff members called CU Stands Up that has been hosting weekly vigils opposing ICE outside the Columbia gates for the past 40 weeks. Along with student activists, the group decided to escalate its tactics this week because of the violence in Minneapolis — including the killing of two U.S. citizens by federal agents — and around the country.
As of 7 p.m. Thursday, the Police Department did not have details about the charges that the protesters were facing. Protest organizers said they were charged with refusal to disperse and blocking vehicular traffic.
“Columbia was the test case for this government strategy of kidnapping people first and then asking questions later,” Jennifer S. Hirsch, a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and one of the protest organizers, said.
She argued that university administrators had failed to take a strong stand against the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate, and other student activists last spring, emboldening the Trump administration.
After a wave of protests that began in 2023 and continued into early 2025, the Columbia campus has been relatively quiet in recent months. The university strengthened protest policies and closed the gates of its main campus to the public. But there remains anger over the decision to make a deal with the Trump administration for the return of research funding, and confusion and suspicion about how much Columbia cooperated with immigration agencies in the arrests of Mr. Khalil and other pro-Palestinian protesters.
“I have a lot of friends who are international students, and I know that they worry about walking down the streets and carrying their documentation,” said Rina Isaac, 20, a junior who was at the protest. “All my friends should be protected and feel like they belong on campus.”
Columbia has repeatedly said that it protects students as much as possible under the law, that it does not collaborate with ICE and that it offers support for international students.
“No member of Columbia leadership or the board of trustees has ever requested the presence of ICE agents on or near campus,” Samantha Slater, a university spokeswoman, said. “This is a completely false assertion.”
Sharon Otterman is a Times reporter covering higher education, public health and other issues facing New York City.
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