At about 9 p.m. on Tuesday night, student protesters who had taken over Hamilton Hall at Columbia University began singing on the steps of the building. “Where you go I will go,” they sang in harmony, linking arms and swaying. “Your people are my people.” Some were in tears.
They had received an alert on Telegram that the New York Police Department would be closing in to arrest them within a few minutes. One protester with the Gaza solidarity encampment screamed, “We are victorious! They would not have called the police on us; they would not have used the tools of state repression if we had not been successful!”
I was a few steps away from the entrance to Hamilton, along with other student reporters from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and reporters with The Spectator, the undergraduate student newspaper, and WKCR, the campus radio station. For weeks, many of us had been sleeping at Pulitzer Hall, the graduate journalism building, to cover what was happening at the Gaza encampment on the main quad, and we were, on some days, the only reporters on the ground. As dozens of police vehicles rolled up, we could only assume that the NYPD was preparing to enter Hamilton by force, and that we would be able to report on what happened.
However, when officers entered the campus near Hamilton at a little past 9 p.m., they immediately told us to move away from the stairs and began to kettle us. Then they began to move all of the press corps toward John Jay Hall, a residential building across from Hamilton Hall. “They used their batons to push us inside,” said Iryna Humenyuk, a master’s student at the journalism school. She was part of a group of approximately 50 people crowded into a narrow vestibule behind the doors. Since none of the press were residents of the building, they remained trapped there. As soon as the space filled up, officers locked the doors and stood guard outside, blocking views to Hamilton. “People were yelling at the police and they just wouldn’t acknowledge anyone or answer any questions,” Humenyuk said. At midnight, long after Hamilton was cleared, she was informed that the group inside could leave in escorted pairs of twos.
Around the same time as police arrived at Hamilton, another group of student press who were on the main quad taking photographs at the encampment were notified that they needed to go inside. “I heard journalists being told by the cops, ‘Go inside now,’” said Oishika Neogi, an investigative journalist at the school. Jelani Cobb, the dean of the journalism school, and Professor Sheila Coronel opened the side door to the Pulitzer building to let them in, and were told by police to keep everyone inside. In an email sent on Wednesday afternoon, Cobb confirmed, “All those who remained inside [campus] were instructed to stay in Pulitzer Hall, or risk arrest. No one was allowed to enter or leave campus.” Those reporters stuck in the building tried to glean what was happening through social-media posts while police officers sat in the basement and the entrance of the hall, leaning against a backdrop of posters showing the nearly 100 journalists killed in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon since October 7.
I had managed to avoid getting pushed into John Jay or Pulitzer, but I found myself in the biggest group of student reporters and professors herded by police outside of campus, to 114th Street and Amsterdam. Dozens of officers surrounded us and confined us there for more than an hour. We began to realize that there was no press left at Hamilton to document what was going on.
The videos that did go online, posted to X, were shot by organizers still in the building. They show students being thrown onto the ground, rolling down the steps, and screaming. Someone taped a police officer texting, “ESU [Emergency Service Unit] used flashbangs. Thought we fucking shot someone.” We had no way to verify the social-media posts or verify what we were hearing. Our phones were running out of battery, it began to rain, and we were each trapped in our respective locations.
By around 11 p.m., after all the protesters had been loaded into police buses, half of the group I was with were finally able to get back into campus with the help of a professor. I was part of another group of student reporters who didn’t get back in, and we had no choice but to wander around the neighborhood for another hour, looking for shelter and a place to charge our phones. Just after midnight, we went back to campus, and after being turned away by campus safety and the NYPD, a dozen professors in the journalism building helped us get escorted back to Pulitzer Hall by police officers.
For many of the student reporters, it was our first time being completely shut out from reporting on an event that happened on campus. While it’s not rare for the police to interfere with or block media access, the near-complete media blackout of student journalists from documenting such a major event was unexpected. We later learned that police had arrested 109 people at Columbia, and are still waiting to hear if any students have been injured in the process.
This morning, I arrived on campus to work, and tried to enter the school through the main entrance at 116th and Amsterdam, the only entrance in operation. Public-safety officers denied me entry until a professor came out with an official list of student reporters that had my name on it. The grounds were eerily silent and mostly empty of people, and almost every building on the quad was lined with barricades and police officers, whom President Minouche Shafik has requested stay on campus until May 17.
By 11:15 a.m., we received a message from Shafik explaining that she had requested the NYPD to enter campus to end the occupation of Hamilton Hall and dismantle the encampment. What we still do not know is how long police will be on campus, when we will be allowed to enter our school without escorts, and if we will get a full picture of what happened in Hamilton Hall on April 30. What we did hear this morning, at the press conference held by Mayor Adams and the NYPD, is the NYPD deputy commissioner saying that we had been cordoned off and restricted from the scene because press “get in the way.”