Campus police arrested 135 pro-Palestinian protestors at the University of Massachusetts Amherst late Tuesday night, hours after students established their second encampment this semester to demand the university divest from organizations connected to the defense industry and Israel.
UMass Chancellor Javier Reyes and other university officials met with a handful of protest organizers Tuesday afternoon to discuss the students’ demands and to ask them to dismantle the encampment, but participating students left the meeting saying they would not remove their tents and surrounding barriers until the university agreed to their proposed divestment strategy.
In an email to students and UMass families Tuesday evening, Reyes wrote that after repeated warnings about an “unauthorized encampment on the South Lawn of the Student Union,” he asked the UMass Police Department to begin dispersing the crowd and dismantling the encampment as “the absolute last resort.”
“We have provided many paths forward for a resolution, including in our discussions today with protest representatives,” Reyes wrote. “While we have told demonstrators that failure to remove the tents and barriers may result in arrests, this is not the outcome we had hoped for.”
At approximately 8 p.m., police officers wearing riot gear surrounded the barricaded tents that students had set up earlier in the afternoon and began arresting a small group of faculty shielding the structure, before moving to detain those inside the encampment as hundreds of people looked on. As the night progressed, other students entered the encampment and barricaded themselves with signs before additional officers and State Police troopers arrived and took them into custody.
In videos posted on the UMass chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine Instagram account, police were seen tackling students who surrounded the encampment while shouting obscenities at the officers. In one video, officers tackled a…