While most other students are preparing for finals, I’m preparing for a criminal trial for a charge with a maximum possible sentence of a year in jail. On May 3, 2025, I was dragged off of “Trotter” lawn by four police officers and thrown into the backseat of a police van under the vindictive stares of Vice President of Student Affairs Stephanie Ives and Director of Public Safety Colin Quinn. My stomach twisted as I looked out the van window at the crowd who stood watching the demolition of our encampment like spectators at a boxing match. I knew their faces: professors whose office hours I frequented, Kohlberg cafe acquaintances, classmates, and friends. Maybe it was the adrenaline, but I was convinced I had just participated in an event that would forever mark Swarthmore’s history.
My eight co-defendants and I were arrested for participating in the Hossam Shabat Liberated Zone, the second pro-Palestine encampment calling on Swarthmore to divest from companies that facilitate Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Specifically, we launched the encampment to target Cisco Systems, a company the college contracts that provides surveillance and communications technology to the Israeli military. After two years of consistent agitation and protest for divestment, we pitched our tents and raised our banners, hoping Swarthmore would finally listen.
Those few days were filled with teach-ins, reading circles, and community dinners that birthed a culture of solidarity otherwise impossible at a college whose social world is defined by cliques and competition. Dozens of students from nearby schools, alumni, parents, and neighbors joined us, bringing food, water, books, and above all, dedication to our cause. One day, a local alum even brought her toddler to play between the tents and read picture books with us. The later characterization of these community members as a “risk” to “safety and security” was laughable to anyone who stepped foot inside the encampment.
Nothing about the encampment threatened the safety of the campus community, but the administration’s decision to break all precedent and call over 30 police officers to crush a peaceful protest did. Arrest was just the beginning; as the only enrolled student in the Swarthmore 9, Swarthmore College has been finding new ways to punish me every day since.
My first suspension was issued by Senior Associate Dean Nathan Miller while I was in police custody: interim suspension, indefinite and effective immediately. At the time, I was still cuffed in the back of the van. The zip-ties were excruciatingly tight, my hands going numb after just a few minutes. The inflamed rings they left on my wrists would take two months to fully fade. The cops pulled us into the police station one by one, leaving the rest waiting anxiously in the van. After they frisked me for a second time, I was walked to the interrogation room, complete with a one-way mirror. There, Ives and Quinn questioned me alongside an armed officer. We were then piled back into the van and shuttled in a dramatic sixteen-vehicle motorcade to the Media police department, with no idea where we were being taken.
While I was in custody, unbeknownst to me, my mother was frantically searching for me, running to the police and fire stations, calling 911, only able to find me after a passing student showed her an Instagram story. The Phoenix published a recording of their interview with her on the ordeal.
After my release from custody, having been banned from campus, I spent weeks crashing at friends’ apartments, struggling to figure out how to afford rent. I had been hired for a research fellowship, but my summer funding was revoked, despite my supervising professor’s protests. Eventually, I found a job, moved into a new apartment, and got Swarthmore off my mind. However, this peace was only momentary: my summer quickly became a ceaseless cycle of frantic preparation, trials, hearings, sanction letters, and hopeless appeals.
In June, Brendan Cook, the other Swarthmore student arrested, and I received major misconduct allegations. On July 11, we saw the courtroom for the first time in our preliminary hearing. Quinn testified against us on the stand. A month after our first court date, we were back in Swarthmore disciplinary proceedings. On August 19, we had a College Judiciary Committee hearing, a kangaroo court which took less than three days to declare us guilty and suspend us for the fall semester. This second suspension was the harshest sanction ever imposed on student activists in Swarthmore’s 162-year history. The most severe sanction prior, a suspension issued to a senior in the spring of 2025 for their use of a bullhorn, was reduced to a campus ban and still allowed them to graduate. While that suspension led to widespread outrage and national news coverage, I find myself having to argue that mine even happened. Swarthmore swept my suspension under the rug, and they intend to do the same with the ongoing criminal case.
Today, my co-defendants and I, who I am now proud to call my friends, are preparing for criminal trial, beginning on June 29, for camping on a lawn in protest of genocide. We face “defiant trespass” charges, a third-degree misdemeanor that carries a maximum sentence of up to a year in prison. This will be the first time in Swarthmore’s history that students have faced criminal trial for campus protest, but this is not only unprecedented at Swarthmore: we will be the only activists to ever face trial for campus pro-Palestine protest in the greater Philadelphia region. Even the arrests at the University of Pennsylvania encampment in May of 2024, which saw 33 protestors dragged off campus by police in full riot gear, resulted in civil citations rather than legal charges because of the policies of progressive Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.
For nearly a year now, I have been newly shocked every few weeks by administration’s vindictiveness. Everywhere I turn, there are more contradictions. The College alleged that they had us arrested to protect “those who are most vulnerable in the current political context.” Yet, in doing so, they did not hesitate to subject me, a low-income Black student, to both the most severe disciplinary sanctions ever imposed for student activism and the criminal justice system many of its professors teach its students to critique. What “vulnerable” community members is Swarthmore protecting by threatening to send me to jail?
For the entire Swarthmore community, the events of May 3, 2025 mark the height of fear and disgrace on our campus. Every community member I have heard from is appalled by what the administration did to us that day. Yet, a year later, it seems all but forgotten. This campus can’t allow the encampment arrests to become simply another entry in the Swarthmore archive while we face up to a year in prison. We are still being made to pay for the college’s mistake.
Most terrifying is that everyone seems to have forgotten what we were there for. Since the destruction of the Hossam Shabat Liberated Zone, thousands of Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians have been slaughtered by the United States and Israel. Despite Trump writing last week that “a whole civilization will die tonight” in the most unpopular war in U.S. history, our campus is silent. In what world are we criminals for protesting this insanity?
No matter what this college puts me through, I’ll never forget why I stood with the encampment to the end. Its namesake, Hossam Shabat, turned 22 years old two days into the Israeli genocide of his people in Gaza. A tall, charming young man with a cheerful smile, he was a college student who dreamed of launching his own media company. When the genocide began, Hossam dropped his ambitions and dedicated his every waking moment to documenting the slaughter of his people. Despite his mother’s pleas, Hossam insisted on remaining in the most dangerous part of Gaza while starving to tirelessly report for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News. He received numerous death threats, but refused to cease his work. For his unwavering dedication to the Palestinian people, Israeli forces assassinated Hossam in a targeted air strike on March 24, 2025.
In his name, we demanded that Swarthmore divest from the occupation that murdered him and 260-plus journalists like him. We wanted Hossam’s dedication to truth and liberation to guide us. He did not have the luxury to look away and keep studying while Israeli bombs destroyed his homeland. He knew what had to be done, and he knew that the occupation would kill him for it. Hossam deserved to graduate, to start his media company, and to fall in love. He deserved to live, but Israel murdered him, and Swarthmore College paid for it.
Instead of divesting from the most well-documented genocide in human history, Swarthmore is persecuting us for holding it accountable. As the trial that will decide our fates rapidly approaches, our campus cannot forget the Swarthmore 9. Demand Swarthmore to drop the charges against us, and continue to demand divestment.
