The campaign comes in response to a Justice Department determination that the school ignored anti-Semitism in violation of civil rights law
Dozens of George Washington University (GW) student groups signed a petition calling on the school to become a “sanctuary campus” by banning from campus all law enforcement, including ICE and the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. They did so in opposition to a Department of Justice determination that GW violated civil rights law by acting “deliberately indifferent” toward campus anti-Semitism.
The petition, endorsed by over 45 organizations, also calls on the Washington, D.C., university to refuse to cooperate with “government efforts to surveil, monitor, deport, or otherwise punish or harm students, workers, faculty, and staff” and to bankroll legal support for any students facing deportation or prosecution.
The GW Socialist Action Initiative, a student group that seeks the “total eradication of the capitalist-imperialist system,” is spearheading the campaign. It announced the list of demands in a Monday Instagram post alongside local and university chapters of several notorious anti-Israel groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the Student Coalition for Palestine, and the Palestinian Youth Movement.
The call to ban law enforcement from GW’s campus comes as the Trump administration federalizes D.C.’s police department. Part of that move includes adding ICE officers and expanding deportations.
The Justice Department determined that GW’s failure to respond to anti-Semitic incidents created a hostile environment for Jewish, American-Israeli, and Israeli students and faculty. It plans to take enforcement action unless GW enters into a voluntary resolution.
But an agreement is exactly what GW Socialist Action Initiative fears. In a caption alongside the petition, the group wrote, “Any deal that GW could reach with the Trump Administration will harm student life and wellbeing.”
“With the Trump Administration’s recent letter to GW no sector of our community is safe,” it said. “From activism, to DEI, to healthcare, no policy or student protection is safe in the wake of this administration’s attack on education.”
“Now more than ever it is essential to stand together and protect our community,” the caption continued. “GW has a responsibility to take a stand for its students, workers, and community; and it is our responsibility as students to pressure GW to take this stand!”
GW’s Jewish community, however, hasn’t enjoyed safety or protection since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack. The Justice Department’s letter pointed to a number of anti-Semitic incidents, including several examples of Jewish students being surrounded by agitators who “yelled antisemitic slurs in their faces, and forced them to flee.”
A group of Jewish students also sued GW in May, accusing it of failing to address the “pervasive and severe anti-semitic harassment” that surged following Hamas’s massacre. In one instance, the suit alleges that GW SJP president Lance Lokas spat on one of the unnamed Jewish plaintiffs. And at an anti-Israel encampment erected on campus in spring 2024, an SJP member followed a Jewish student and her friends as they tried to walk away and loudly called out, “Imagine being a Zionist, they’re so ugly, fat, and stupid,” the complaint alleges.
GW’s SJP chapter first demanded that GW become a “sanctuary campus” in May when a group of students, faculty, and staff marched to GW president Ellen Granberg’s residence. In an Instagram post, the group declared, “As students and faculty nationwide continue facing fascist repression and threats of deportation, it is critical that GW concede to our demands and truly stand by its community.”
Columbia University’s graduate student union pushed a similar effort in March to make the Ivy League school a sanctuary campus. In a Zoom meeting the Washington Free Beacon attended, members of the Student Workers of Columbia demanded the university bar public safety officers from patrolling “organizing spaces, including classrooms,” destroy “all records” related to campus protest participants, and sue the Trump administration “and other anti-immigrant actors.”
GW did not respond to a request for comment.
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