In 2024, millions of students around the world rose up in solidarity with the people of Palestine. They could not sit idly while their brothers and sisters in Gaza were being slaughtered by the genocidal Israeli state backed by the USA.
Instead of listening to their students’ concerns, university administrators treated them like criminals – denouncing, them, expelling them, refusing them to graduate. In many instances, university officials unleashed hordes of police on the students, brutalizing many of them.
In the DMV area, the fallout from the encampments has led to several Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters being banned by their universities. This includes SJP at American University, which was banned for two years, until 2027.
But repression hasn’t meant surrender. Two cases in the DMV, at the University of Maryland and George Washington University, show what it looks like when students refuse to let administrators have the last word.
The University of Maryland’s crackdown came to a head in September 2024, when President Darryl Pines announced that no student-organized events would be permitted on campus on October 7, the one-year mark of Israel’s assault on Gaza, except university-sponsored programming centered on “reflection.” The move effectively banned UMD SJP’s planned interfaith vigil to mourn Palestinian lives lost over the previous year.
UMD SJP didn’t accept the silencing quietly. The group partnered with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Palestine Legal and sued the university, the University System of Maryland Board of Regents, and Pines himself, arguing the ban was an unconstitutional, viewpoint-based restriction on speech.
They won. On October 1, 2024, U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte granted a preliminary injunction, ruling that UMD SJP was likely to succeed on its First Amendment claim, since the university’s revocation wasn’t viewpoint or content neutral and wasn’t narrowly tailored when less restrictive safety measures were available. The vigil went forward on McKeldin Mall on October 7 and drew more than 500 community members for speeches, teach-ins, and prayers, co-hosted with the university’s Jewish Voice for Peace chapter.
The legal fight didn’t end there. Nearly a year later, in August 2025, the lawsuit was resolved with a $100,000 settlement paid by the University of Maryland. Palestine Legal says it’s likely the highest financial penalty ever imposed on a U.S. university for violating pro-Palestinian students’ free speech rights. As part of the resolution, UMD affirmed that SJP remains a registered student organization in good standing, one that had already held more than 100 events on campus since October 7, 2023, all in compliance with university policy.
The victory landed at a moment when, as Palestine Legal noted, the Trump administration has been pressuring universities through investigations, funding threats, and demands for student records to intensify the punishment of pro-Palestinian organizing. A UMD SJP member said the group would put every dollar of the settlement toward organizing for a free Palestine and collective liberation.
George Washington University’s chapter has faced an even longer campaign of sanctions, dating back to November 2023, when the university handed down a 90-day suspension over a projection GWU SJP displayed on the Gelman Library. Officials called the messaging antisemitic. SJP maintained it was protected political speech responding to an unfolding atrocity, and one representative said at the time that the group would fight the ban “on every front.”
That fight dragged on for years. In spring 2025, GWU issued a fresh suspension, this one lasting until May 2026, barring the group from all campus activity and from associating with GW in any capacity, after it hosted events tied to a planned “Palestine Liberation Week” without university sign-off. That summer, the university went further and revoked SJP’s organizational status entirely through spring 2027 over the group’s campaign to have economics professor Joseph Pelzman fired.
Facing a second sanction in four months, and a university that seemed determined to strip the group of any institutional standing, GWU SJP made a call: instead of continuing to plead for recognition from an administration unwilling to grant it fairly, the group disaffiliated from GW altogether. As the chapter put it, SJP had never consistently received the privileges extended to other student organizations, like funding or the ability to book space on campus, so members chose to leave on their own terms rather than keep seeking legitimacy the university was never going to give in good faith.
UMD SJP and GWU SJP landed on very different strategies. One dragged its university into federal court and made it pay. The other refused to keep begging for a seat at a table that was never set for them in the first place. Both tell the same underlying story: administrators across the DMV have tried to use suspensions, bans, and legal threats to make Palestine solidarity organizing disappear from their campuses, and in case after case, students have refused to let repression be the final word.
American University’s SJP chapter remains banned until 2027. Other chapters across the region keep organizing under the threat of discipline, doxxing, and federal pressure campaigns that show no sign of letting up. But the lesson from College Park and Foggy Bottom is the same one student movements have learned for generations: administrators can revoke a club’s status, but they can’t revoke a movement.
Related Links:
AU SJP
UMD SJP
GWU SJP
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