Nine protesters, including one Swarthmore student and one student on an extended leave of absence, were arrested last Saturday, May 3, ending the four-day Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) encampment on Trotter Lawn. The seven others arrested were unaffiliated with the college, and their affiliations are largely unknown at the time of publication; however, one was identified as a Temple University student in an article in The Guardian.
On Wednesday, April 30, SJP erected the encampment on campus, a year after it first occupied Parrish Lawn in May 2024, protesting the ongoing war in Gaza. Shortly after establishing the 2025 encampment, SJP announced their two demands in an email to the Swarthmore community: that the college divest from companies profiting from the war and commit to protecting vulnerable students under the Trump administration. A few hours after the encampment was established, Vice President of Student Affairs Stephanie Ives stated, “We have heard your demands and do not intend to meet them.”
Regarding the second demand of the encampment, Vice President for Communications and Marketing Andy Hirsch shared that Ives’s rejection of the demand does not indicate any increased willingness from the college to cooperate with ICE, DHS, or Federal agencies.
“We have been clear and consistent on this issue. The college will not voluntarily share information with immigration enforcement officials, nor will we voluntarily grant them access to College property or support enforcement activity on campus,” Hirsch wrote in an email to The Phoenix. “We are obligated to comply with the law, but we will do so without preemptively adhering to changes in federal policy that undermine our mission.”
He also mentioned that the administration’s past attempts to reach out to the campus regarding the protection of students under the Trump administration didn’t appear to have had the effect of resolving the encampment’s demand. He added that the administration’s attempts to engage in conversation with the individuals in the encampment had been unsuccessful, and that “to my knowledge, there was no outreach from the protesters to the administration. They didn’t send their ‘demands,’ request a meeting, etc.”
Protesters at the encampment, however, consistently indicated to The Phoenix that they had not received any communication from the college outside of letters notifying them of interim suspensions. At time of publication, the college has yet to provide documentation of its attempts to contact protesters to The Phoenix.
Throughout the encampment, the college issued multiple orders for the protesters to disperse. Two letters were handed out to the protesters a few hours after the protest started on Wednesday. The first informed students that the encampment violated the college’s Code of Conduct (CoC), issuing a 4 p.m. deadline for students to disperse. The second informed students that the college was working to issue interim suspensions for violating the CoC. The sanction of interim suspension was added to the CoC this year, inciting controversy about the Division of Student Affairs’s sole discretion over its use.
Protesters moved lawn chairs and wooden pallets into the encampment, including the “Big Chair,” which was graffitied with speech that President Val Smith later described in an email to the community as “abhorrent statements celebrating violence and promoting hate.” The Phoenix captured a photo of the “Big Chair” that included drawn hearts around “Hamas,” “Houthis,” “Hezbollah,” and messages such as “Bomb Tel Aviv, not children,” and “Fuck Swat.” Other photos posted on social media showed a chair that had been vandalized with the message “Let’s Go Bomb Tel Aviv.” On Thursday morning, Public Safety and facilities staff collected the chairs and removed seating from Trotter Lawn, Parrish Porch, and Kohlberg Courtyard, which remains removed as of May 7.
The college began to issue interim suspensions on Thursday, culminating in seven total suspensions before the arrests on Saturday morning. Another email from SJP sent at 7:22 p.m. on Thursday wrote that “Swarthmore has dropped all pretenses and ‘interim suspended’ two low-income students, both seniors from single-parent households, on full financial aid.” Around 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, the Swarthmore Police Department issued trespassing notices, citing criminal trespassing law 3503(b) for “defiant trespasser.”
The departure of suspended students, combined with a lower protester turnout compared to last year’s encampment and SJP’s public call for allies to join the protest, ultimately resulted in more outside protesters than Swarthmore students at the time of arrests. President Smith said the group’s social media posts drew the FBI’s attention to the encampment.
Thursday also marked the beginning of widespread network problems at the college. In a Swat Alert from Chief Information Technology Officer Jason Parkhill, he wrote that “Based on the information available to us now, we believe this is an intentional cyber act targeting the College,” but clarified that there was no reason to believe that any data or private information had been compromised. While many rumors circulated around campus that there was a connection between the cyber attack and the encampment, Hirsch wrote in an email to The Phoenix on Tuesday that the college believes them to be independent events.
According to Hirsch, however, the cyber attack was the origin of the FBI’s interaction with Swarthmore this week. He wrote that the college reached out to the FBI’s cyber division for help in “identifying the source of a campus-wide network outage and resolving it.” Hirsch shared that at this point, the FBI informed the college that they were aware of the encampment on campus, including the increased social media traffic generated by SJP’s posts and the planning of unaffiliated individuals to join the encampment.
“Given the security concerns that information raised, [the FBI] urged the college to bring the encampment to an end as soon as possible,” Hirsch wrote, noting that this is not the first time the FBI has raised concerns over protest activity in response to social media traffic.
An emergency faculty meeting was held on the evening of Friday, May 2, to discuss the plans to convince students to leave the encampment before law enforcement arrived on campus. As a result, two plans were set in motion. The first was an ultimatum for the protesters to disperse by 11 p.m. or law enforcement would be called. The second was an “off-ramp” coordinated by the Committee on Faculty Procedures, including Acting Provost Kathleen Howard, that offered modified sanctions for students who left before the deadline. As some faculty members debated the plan and how to communicate with protesters, Smith moved the deadline for dispersal from its original deadline to midnight, then again to 1 a.m. Many faculty shared with The Phoenix that the meeting was more informational than conversational.
Before it became clear that the arrests would not happen while it was dark, a crowd of students gathered outside Parrish Hall to document the anticipated arrests, including representatives of The Phoenix. Members of the encampment, whom none of the Swarthmore students gathered recognized as peers, came out to tell the crowd that the arrests would likely happen in the light the next day. They said, “You should stay if you want, though, it’ll be fun,” and asked the crowd to join the encampment, offering the promise of cigarettes.
On Saturday morning, around 7:35 a.m., 34 police officers from eight nearby departments across Delaware County arrived at the scene in seventeen vehicles. A crowd of dozens of faculty observers, students, journalists, and protesters had gathered. Most were recording on their phones.
After Vice President for Student Affairs Stephanie Ives, Interim Director of Public Safety Colin Quinn, Vice President for Campus Services Anthony Coschignano, and around two police officers entered the encampment, Ives addressed the protesters and reiterated the administration’s perspective on the encampment – that it was endangering the campus community – as well as the consequence of both arrest and interim suspension for those who didn’t leave.
Ives gave one last warning to the protesters ten minutes before arrests began: “I urge you to take all of this into consideration and to end this encampment right now.” Chief of the Swarthmore Borough Police Department Raymond C. Stufflet addressed the protesters next, delivering the final warning of arrest if they did not leave within ten minutes. The administrators left the encampment, and Stufflet instructed the other officers to wait until 8 a.m. before moving in to arrest protesters and dismantle the encampment. Some protesters left the encampment in the window between the warnings and the arrests, and a few joined the crowd watching the arrests and took the opportunity to chant at police.
At 8 a.m., the police moved into the encampment, with members of the college staff following shortly after to dismantle tents, throwing chairs and other equipment out of the ring. The police moved to arrest the nine remaining protesters, who had linked arms, often with three or four officers pulling each protester out of the ring, restraining them on the ground, and then using zip-ties on their arms while they carried them to the vans. Some of the protesters were carried in the air.
Following the arrests, protesters were taken to the Swarthmore Police Department on Park Avenue for processing, where several of those who were arrested identified Ives in the department’s interview room. Outside of the station, a crowd of non-arrested protesters gathered. While the officers made a line in the middle of Lafayette Avenue by their squad cars, many in the crowd shouted at them, often with derogatory remarks. One officer aggressively questioned a Swarthmore faculty member near the scene. Several passers-by in the town of Swarthmore stopped their morning activities to watch the events unfolding, and one man walked up and said, “Thank God for Donald J. Trump.”
After processing in the Swarthmore Police Department, the arrested protesters were transferred in a motorcade of sixteen police vehicles to the Media Borough Police Department. Footage of the transfer along N. Chester Road can be found below.
At the Media Borough Police Department, a similar crowd gathered across the parking lot from where the police vans with the arrested protesters were parked. As the protesters were escorted one by one into the department for further processing before being released, around 30 Swarthmore students and faculty members, regional activists, and others talked and coordinated. A cheer broke out with the release of each protester, and many of them intermittently shouted at the officers between each release, making similar derogatory remarks to those before.
In the parking lot, the mom of the current Swarthmore student who was arrested told The Phoenix that she had been given no information by the school as to where her child was since their transfer from the Swarthmore Police Department. This account conflicts with what faculty members say they were explicitly told by Ives: that she would inform parents about where students were being taken and processed after arrest. The student’s mother spoke of arriving at the Swarthmore Police Department to an empty building, having to ask the next-door fire department, and then resorting to calling 911 to find her child before learning from another Swarthmore student with her that her child was in Media. The audio of her recount of the difficult sequence of events can be found below.
Shortly after noon on Saturday, The Phoenix confirmed that the last of the nine arrested protesters had been released. In an interview with The Phoenix, the former Swarthmore student who had been arrested emphasized that they “didn’t want to abstract this.” They continued, “This was a series of decisions that the administration and the administration made alone. They could have protected vulnerable students if they wanted. They are the people endangering vulnerable students by unhousing them and subjecting them to violent arrests.”
The student said that during the arrests, they had their keffiyeh and mask ripped off and thrown on the ground before they were pushed down themself, with their arm pinned underneath. They also mentioned that many of those arrested were covered in bruises, scrapes, and cuts, and detailed how “they told me that if I didn’t, like, get on my feet, that my head would hit the curb or the door of the paddy wagon.”
They concluded, saying that the commitment of the students’ movement to Palestine is unwavering: “The more that they try to silence us, the louder that we will be … there is no amount of oppression that we could ever face as students that compares to even a fraction of a percent of what’s happening to the people of Palestine on a daily basis.” They continued, “Palestinians are burning alive, and they think that the best decision they can make is to unhouse one of our students and arrest others.”
While the arrests were being processed in Media, Smith wrote another email to the Swarthmore community to explain her “terribly difficult decision to seek assistance from the Swarthmore Borough Police Department.” The email reiterated the threats posed to campus by unaffiliated individuals joining the protest. The message again referenced that SJP’s social media promotion of the protest drew the attention of the FBI, which reportedly urged the administration to bring it to an end.
The FBI’s monitoring of the encampment and recommendation for the college to end it have become a crucial element of the conversation surrounding the arrests, given the Trump Administration’s unprecedented interference with higher education and promise to use law enforcement to crack down on student activism and immigration. Several faculty told The Phoenix that senior administrators had clarified at the faculty briefing that the FBI was initially called to campus in relation to the cyber issue. Hirsch confirmed that Swarthmore had called the FBI’s cyber division for help with the cyber attack before the Bureau shared that they were aware of the encampment and urged the college to end it.
Hirsch also wrote in an email to The Phoenix that he felt the media coverage of the event had often mischaracterized the FBI’s role in the college’s decision-making, clarifying that the college “did not feel ‘pressure’ from the FBI.” He noted the concern over risks posed by the growing presence of individuals with no known affiliation to the college: “As President Smith said in her message to the community on Saturday, the sole motivation for making the difficult decision to seek assistance from local law enforcement was to protect the safety and security of the campus community.” Hirsch concluded, “The FBI did not interfere with any College operations or decision-making.”
The decision-making process about whether to call law enforcement was also reportedly impacted by the increased risk to international students during the Trump Administration, with visas being revoked seemingly at random or in connection with protest activity. Faculty and students shared concerns that increased federal attention on the college could increase this risk for Swarthmore students specifically.
On Sunday, the Swarthmore community received an email from an address named “wewillbeback lltr” with SJP’s full statement on the arrests. The message included photos of injuries allegedly received by protesters at the hands of the police and positioned the arrests in relation to ongoing violence in Gaza.
In the days following the arrests, the Swarthmore community has grappled with what happened and the events that led up to it. President Smith did not respond to a request to interview for this story and declined to comment following the faculty briefing on Friday.
In an email to The Phoenix, Swarthmore’s representative in the PA State House, Jennifer O’Mara (D – HD 165), said that the college did not connect with her office to warn, plan, or consult in anticipation of law enforcement’s presence on campus or the FBI’s presence on campus.
O’Mara wrote that she would want to hear from Swarthmore about the FBI and the Trump administration’s interactions with the college and whether they included any threats of intervention before making an overall judgment on the decision to call law enforcement.
“We’ve seen how callous the Trump administration has been towards students who speak out in support of Gaza and having any federal agents on Swarthmore’s campus is something I fear would put students, not just those protesting, in danger.” O’Mara continued, writing, “I think it’s telling that the [Swarthmore] administration took these steps this year but did not last year when we were under a far different presidential administration.”
While Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer likely has discretion over whether to file charges and which charges to bring against the nine protesters who were arrested, little has been released about this decision. At the time of publication, Stollsteimer has not responded to The Phoenix’s request for more details about this decision and how it would be made.
The preferences and cooperation of the owner of the land that was trespassed on – in this case, Swarthmore College – are often strongly considered in the decisions of District Attorneys in similar cases. The college has not yet responded to The Phoenix’s request for more information on whether Swarthmore would request that charges be brought or cooperate with the investigation.
