The Gaza solidarity encampments of spring 2024 — beginning at Columbia and spreading to well over a hundred campuses — produced upwards of 3,100 arrests in a matter of weeks, the largest wave of student political arrests since 1970. Universities summoned police onto their own campuses at a scale not seen since the Vietnam era: the NYPD's clearance of Columbia's Hamilton Hall on April 30, riot-line sweeps at UCLA that followed a night of unpoliced mob attack on the encampment, and mass zip-tie processions at Emory, UT Austin, Dartmouth, and dozens more, professors and legal observers among those taken.

Most criminal charges were dropped or reduced within months — Manhattan prosecutors dismissed the bulk of the Columbia cases — but the universities' internal machinery continued where prosecutors stopped: suspensions, expulsions, withheld degrees, and eviction from housing, punishments imposed without the criminal law's protections. The encampment spring established the pattern the following years hardened: the criminal cases would mostly fail, while the administrative and immigration systems — which need not prove anything to a jury — did the movement's lasting punishment.