‘This is not the end’: Pro-Palestinian demonstrators retake UC Santa Cruz entrance after 16-hour police standoff

After a standoff lasting more than 16 hours between police and pro-Palestinian demonstrators at the base of UC Santa Cruz’s campus, protesters seemed to have outlasted law enforcement, who drew back and allowed the group made up largely of students to retake their ground Friday afternoon and again block the campus’ Coolidge Drive entrance. 

UCSC officials said approximately 80 protesters have been arrested since around 10 p.m. Thursday, when officers from the California Highway Patrol, Santa Cruz Police Department and campus law enforcement moved in to clear the encampment. Campers assembled starting May 20 outside the Barn Theater after graduate student workers formally launched a strike in response to campus treatment of the pro-Palestinian protesters. Students and faculty originally set up a camp to occupy Quarry Plaza on May 1 but had since moved toward the campus entrance. 

Officers, flanked by guards from private security outfit High Rock Security, left the area around 2:30 p.m. Friday, leading to a scene of elation from protesters, who, wearing keffiyehs and waving the colors of Palestine, chanted, hugged and cheered to honking cars that passed by on the adjacent High Street, which reopened after police left. The group, however, considers it only a single win in a larger ongoing battle. 

“This is not the end of the fight, this is a victory,” a young woman told the crowd beneath an oak tree after police had vacated the area. “There are comrades working to get people out of jail to continue to disrupt. This doesn’t end today, this doesn’t end at the end of the quarter. This ends when [UCSC] divests, this ends when Palestine is free.” 

The young woman urged the crowd to get others to join the fight and continue protesting. When she lamented not having a formal encampment anymore following the police raid, a man from the crowd yelled, “We gonna make one again!” which elicited loud cheers from the group.

After law enforcement evicted the protesters from their camp and backed them across High Street, an infantry of mostly CHP officers formed across the campus entrance; well over 100 officers and dozens of police cars moved in to take over. At one point, it looked as though officers outnumbered the dwindling crowd of protesters, who filed into their own locked-arm line just yards across from state police, supplying a steady chorus of chants, drum lines and shouting at the growing line of police officers.

When the clock hit 11 a.m. at the main entrance of the UC Santa Cruz campus, two white buses marked with UCSC decals and filled with detained students, faculty and other pro-Palestinian demonstrators drove off up Coolidge Drive to the UCSC Genomics Institute as a holding area to process and charge those arrested. Arrested students were also taken to the Santa Cruz County Jail. Neither the Santa Cruz Police Department nor the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office responded to questions from Lookout regarding the arrests.

Late Friday afternoon, Max Kaplan, a graduate student in linguistics who is striking as part of the United Auto Workers 4811 labor action, stood outside the UCSC Genomics Institute at 2300 Delaware Ave. with a group of students offering help to those detained. He said all arrested students had been released and accounted for. Kaplan said the police had charged students and faculty, but said he was unsure of how many students or the specifics of the charges.

“The university gave them all two-week suspensions and said they were prohibited from coming on campus, even if they live in on-campus housing,” Kaplan said. “So, basically, those people have been temporarily evicted.”

UCSC spokesperson Abby Butler did not answer questions about how many protesters were charged or jailed, or whether any faced academic discipline from the school. “At the moment, I don’t have any additional information to share,” she wrote in an email to Lookout on Friday. “As more info comes in, I’ll be sure to pass it along to you.” She didn’t respond to questions about how the university would react if protesters continued to block the main entrance or reestablished the encampment. 

Earlier Friday morning, UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Cynthia Larive emailed the school community, defending her decision to send in police and forcefully clear the student encampment at the base of campus. On Friday afternoon, University of California President Michael V. Drake issued a statement backing UCSC administrators’ decision to use police to break up the encampment.

“I support the campus and Chancellor Larive in taking the necessary steps this morning to begin clearing campus entrances and exits and restoring and maintaining free access to campus for all members of the community,” Drake wrote. “The situation on campus remains fluid and we will continue to offer support and resources to UC Santa Cruz leaders during this difficult period.”

Among those critical of Larive and Drake was Marisol LeBrón, an associate professor in feminist studies and critical race and ethnic studies. “UCSC deployed hundreds of police from all over NorCal to arrest 100+ students and 3 faculty (one of whom was me),” LeBrón wrote on Twitter. “The way UCOP and the UCSC Chancellor fucked up… wow. The reckoning is around the corner and I can’t wait to see their legacies in tatters.”

Over the past month, organized calls for UC Santa Cruz to divest from its ties to Israel amid the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza have evolved into camps and blockades at the campus’s entrances. The protests escalated overnight Thursday, when agencies such as the campus police, SCPD and California Highway Patrol moved in to clear the camps.

Students reported that police hit them with batons and physically pulled them from their camp outside the Barn Theater. By Friday afternoon, all of the tents, sleeping pads, coolers, bins of food and other camp amenities meant to sustain protesters had been bulldozed and loaded into an Enterprise box truck. The camp had been replaced with dozens of CHP vehicles, as tractors and custodians worked to clear the area, taking down Palestinian flags planted on nearby traffic lights.

Behind the line of protesters, young women bearing bullhorns led the group through a broad series of chants, from “every time the media lies, a little girl in Rafah dies,” to “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” One of the women, a third-year UCSC student who identified herself only as Fleabag, said she has been living at the different variations of the encampment since May 1. She said she spent the morning in a local emergency room after a police officer shoved a baton into her stomach. She lifted up her shirt to show the red marks and broken skin around her navel.

“I’m still having trouble breathing, it’s just sharp pains right now,” she said, intermittently coughing behind a black facemask. “The police were sticking their batons into people, trying to pull them out from the camp. It was f—king horrible. I’m on two different pain medications right now from the hospital.”

Along the police line, Sgt. David Ward, a CHP officer from the Truckee region, said he had gotten the call to UCSC’s campus at 4 a.m. He said a lot of the officers aren’t from the local units, but from areas around the state that had been called in to help.

“We’re not here to take sides, we just want to make sure people aren’t going up to campus to damage state property,” Ward said. “We appreciate the expression of their opinions. Many of us were in the military and our time in the military was spent to ensure that freedom of speech was maintained.”

Ward said CHP was there at the request of the university.

“When you have a group of protesters this large, the [campus police] are going to be overwhelmed,” Ward said. “Just because these officers are here doesn’t mean we don’t agree with the things they are saying, and it doesn’t mean we don’t have views that are similar. But we have a job to do and that is to protect life, protect property, and make sure that everybody is law-abiding.” 

On the periphery of the standoff, a trio of older women, some wearing neon orange vests and makeshift chest plates that read “Legal Observer” watched the officers and took notes. They declined comment, saying only that they worked for the National Lawyers Guild. At one point, a young man who identified himself only as Jafar approached the women, complaining that some CHP officers were not wearing their badge numbers or nameplates.

Later in the afternoon, Jafar, a fourth-year undergraduate who had been with the protesters since 10:30 the evening before, grabbed some loose pieces of paper from a reporter so he could complete an exam for his economics course.

Jafar, who wanted to remain anonymous so as not to face “any academic repercussions for peacefully protesting,” said the protesters’ ranks had diminished drastically since police first moved in overnight.

“Some have [been detained], some have dwindled out from exhaustion, I mean this has been a 12-hour standoff with police,” he said. “I plan on going somewhere quiet and hopefully finishing my midterm, but then I will come back, and I will be here until the end. Hopefully the demands from the students will be met. Ultimately, what comes out of this is just more awareness [of] these demands and what’s going on, which is statewide oppression, excess funding to the police state and military-industrial complex, and, you know, maybe we can shift some of these funds to students and graduate students and faculty.”

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