At least six of the Columbia students arrested for storming a Columbia University library on Wednesday are repeat offenders, including one student who demanded humanitarian aid from university, a Washington Free Beacon review found. They had already been arrested and disciplined for their involvement in earlier campus building raids or in last spring’s encampments.
Of the 81 total arrests, at least 44 are Columbia students, while at least 13 attend the university’s sister school, Barnard College. Also arrested was one Barnard faculty member, Eva-Quenby Johnson, as well as two students at another Columbia affiliate, Union Theological Seminary.
The masked mob clashed with security officials, injuring two, passed out pamphlets endorsing Hamas’s violence, vandalized and damaged the library, and renamed it after Basel al-Araj, a Palestinian terrorist killed in a 2017 shootout with the Israel Defense Forces.
Columbia security officials blocked the exits and told the radicals they needed to leave and show their identification on the way out or face arrest. The university made good on its threat after several hours and sent in New York Police Department officers, who zip-tied agitators and hauled them onto a bus.
Below are some of the most notable students arrested.
Ramona Sarsgaard
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s daughter, Ramona Sarsgaard, was among the anti-Israel radicals arrested by NYPD on Wednesday.
Gyllenhaal, a Columbia alumna, has described her daughter as “a real environmental activist,” boasting in 2019 that Sarsgaard, then 13, inspired her to join the cause.
“She, like many, many children, isn’t able to push out of her mind the dire situation that we’re in,” Gyllenhaal told People. “They’re really concerned and upset, demanding that the grownups pay attention. My daughter did that to me and it took me a minute.”
That didn’t stop Sarsgaard from donning a tan leather set at Paris Fashion Week in January.
Sarsgaard, whose father is Peter Sarsgaard, has also been a source of inspiration for her Oscar-nominated uncle—she and her sister influenced Jake Gyllenhaal to coauthor The Secret Society of Aunts and Uncles, a 2023 book about the relationships between aunts and uncles and their nieces and nephews.
Students Arrested or Suspended for Previous Building Stormings
At least four of the students arrested have already faced punishment for previously raiding campus buildings.
Columbia students Symmes Cannon and Hannah Puelle were arrested and suspended after they joined a mob that stormed Barnard College’s Millstein Library in March and clashed with police when they refused to leave. It’s unclear if their suspensions are still in effect. At least one student arrested and suspended over that incident, Gabrielle Wimer, resumed class beginning in mid-April, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Marianne Almero, a recent Columbia graduate, and Samarra Sankar, who attends Barnard, were arrested after storming Hamilton Hall last spring. Almero interned at the Urban Indigenous Collective, where she engaged in “social justice advocacy to decolonize education institutions, climate justice, incarceration and police systems, and health accessibility.” The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office dismissed most criminal charges, while Columbia disciplined the students involved—nearly a year after the storming.
Two other Columbia students, Johannah King-Slutzky and Anjali Vishwanath, were also detained and suspended over their participation in last year’s encampment. King-Slutzky, a Columbia doctoral student, gained notoriety last spring for demanding “humanitarian aid” and “a glass of water” for the violent radicals occupying Hamilton. Though she did not participate in the occupation itself, King-Slutzky was arrested at the encampment earlier that month and was suspended. This did not stop her from instructing a “Contemporary Western Civilization” course at the Ivy League school last fall.
Vishwanath, a student at Columbia’s School of Social Work, declared last spring that it was “an honor to be arrested and suspended for Palestine.” In the 2024-25 academic year, she served as a member of Columbia’s Action Lab for Social Justice, a student-driven initiative that “aims to uproot systems of oppression.”
Sueda Polat
Last spring, Sueda Polat, a Columbia graduate student in human rights, served as a negotiator for the encampment on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), the school’s most anti-Semitic student group. She collaborated with Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia protest leader in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, to press the university to divest from Israel by “any available means necessary.” Polat also worked alongside CUAD spokesman Khymani James, who has publicly fantasized about “murdering Zionists.”
Dalia Darazim
Darazim, a sophomore majoring in Middle Eastern studies, penned a January 2024 piece in the Columbia Spectator attacking Columbia and her fellow students for not taking an aggressive stance against Israel’s retaliation following Oct. 7.
“I realized that for my peers in the human rights major, Palestine was not a part of their self-proclaimed efforts for social justice,” she wrote. “I realized that not only was the Palestinian cause not included in anyone’s agenda, but Palestinians themselves had no place on Columbia’s campus.”
Darazim also participated in last spring’s encampment. In a June 10 Columbia Spectator op-ed, she accused reporters asking about Jews who felt unsafe of enabling genocide.
“Time after time, I took a deep breath, and delivered a thoughtful, diplomatic answer in response to this genocide-enabling question—a question that deliberately denies Palestinians the right to narrative by centering college campuses and their students over the ongoing slaughter in Gaza,” Darazim wrote. “No American college student’s feelings should be centered over Palestinian lives.”
Sumera Subzwari
Sumera Subzwari, a graduate student at Columbia’s Teachers College, identifies as a “disabled mushroom forager.” In an April 2024 article, Subzwari shared that her love of mushrooms stems from their alignment with “disability justice.” A year prior, she was awarded a scholarship from the Vegan Women Summit.
“I fell in love with mushrooms because they align so clearly with disability justice,” she wrote. “Disabled folks exist outside of what society considers ‘normal,’ and mushrooms are just the same—thriving through nonconformity.”
None of the arrestees nor Columbia responded to a request for comment.
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