How California Spent Natural Disaster Funds to Quell Student Protests for Palestine

Cal Poly Humboldt students had been occupying a campus building in solidarity with Palestine for three days when then-university President Tom Jackson decided to bring the demonstration to an end. But he didn’t think the university could break the occupation, some two dozen members strong, on its own. In an email to the sheriff of the Humboldt Police Department on April 25, 2024, Jackson asked to tap a pool of policing cash clothed in the language of anarchist solidarity: the “law enforcement mutual aid system.”

In California, the Law Enforcement Mutual Aid Fund sets aside $25 million annually to let law enforcement agencies work across jurisdictions to fight natural disasters and other major emergencies. In a briefing obtained by The Intercept, acceptable LEMA use cases are listed as fires, storms, flooding, earthquakes, natural or man-made disasters, and “other extra ordinary events requiring emergency law enforcement mutual aid on a case by case basis.”

Leadership at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt — part of the California State University public school system — was able to tap these funds to bring outside law enforcement onto campus, The Intercept found in an investigative series on the university playbook for crushing pro-Palestine protests. Among more than 20,000 pages of documentation The Intercept obtained via public records requests, email after email from April and May 2024 show chiefs of police and administrators in California’s public universities asking outside law enforcement agencies to enter their campuses and clear encampments.

As “Gaza solidarity” encampments popped up across college campuses in April and May 2024, Jodi Lopez, staff services manager at California’s Office of Emergency Services, informed the leadership of at least 30 public universities — including Cal Poly Humboldt — that if they were to require mutual aid assistance, LEMA would be available to reimburse their expenses, attaching a flyer that detailed eligible costs.

Cal Poly Humboldt students first entered and staged a peaceful sit-in at Siemens Hall on April 22. According to the documents obtained by The Intercept, leadership at the university was promptly in contact with local police departments about bringing the demonstration to an end. That day, police in riot gear attempted to enter the building and clear out the protesters, but students held them off. In an incident that would go viral on social media, a student could be seen on surveillance footage hitting officers on their helmets with an empty plastic water jug. The cops eventually withdrew from the building, marking the start of what would turn into an eight-day occupation.

Enlisting the help of Humboldt County’s Office of Emergency Services, the Eureka Police Department, and the University of California Police Department, Jackson’s email on April 25 requested assistance with “Reestablish[ing] control of university buildings and other property” and “eliminating the threat of domestic violent extremism and criminal behavior” on the part of the students — setting into motion the plan with which the cops ultimately cleared the hall. Ryan Derby, then head of the county OES, added in his mutual aid request that Cal Poly Humboldt would require the assistance of a total of 250 law enforcement officers, with “personnel for entry team trained in tactical room clearing and arrest and control.”

In a statement emailed to The Intercept, Cal Poly Humboldt spokesperson Aileen S. Yoo confirmed that the university “formally requested from the state Law Enforcement Officer support through the LEMA request process” and noted that “Cal Poly Humboldt remains firmly committed to upholding the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment, ensuring that all members of our community can speak, assemble, and express their views.”

A Cal OES spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Intercept that “Local law enforcement who provided that support to Cal Poly Humboldt were reimbursed through the LEMA Fund program.” The statewide office “is committed to protecting Californians and supporting local partners in times of crisis, regardless of political views or affiliation,” the spokesperson wrote.

If there were ever a social contract between students and administrators at U.S. universities that allowed for the operation of insulated, on-campus police departments thought to be better attuned to the needs of students, that contract was shattered when universities nationwide brought in outside law enforcement to crush the student-led movement for Palestine, argued civil liberties advocates who spoke with The Intercept. A year before the Trump administration would step up efforts to use police power against public protest, the Palestine solidarity encampments made universities a test case for the tolerance of dissent — one that universities overwhelmingly failed.

“ I don’t even know if we can talk about the trust that students have in their universities. But if there was any trust, you ruin it when you bring in outside police to harm your own students,” said Sabiya Ahamed, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal.

“If campus closure is required through the weekend, revenue loss will grow considerably.”

As Jackson stated in his email, Cal Poly Humboldt’s budget was at stake. “Three large events and a dozen smaller events on campus have been canceled. Athletic events have been either canceled or moved off main campus,” he wrote. “If campus closure is required through the weekend, revenue loss will grow considerably.”

University and outside law enforcement would go on to arrest 25 students at Siemens Hall. Alongside over a dozen wildfires — including the deadly Palisades Fire, which destroyed more than 6,000 homes — the raid is currently listed on the LEMA website as an example of a case for which funding can be requested.

While it is far from a secret that outside law enforcement agencies were involved in the clearing of university pro-Palestine encampments, these terms of operation — and compensation — have never previously been reported on in detail. Communications between university officials and the outside agencies show that the process took shape in the smooth functioning of bureaucracy, with polite, breezy exchanges preceding violent crackdowns and raids.

As the pro-Palestine demonstrations continued, the practice of bringing outside law enforcement officers onto campus became increasingly normalized in the University of California system. On May 5, 2024, Lamine Secka, chief of police at UC San Diego, wrote to the California Highway Patrol: “Attached, please find a request for assistance to clear out a protest encampment on the UC San Diego campus.” CHP, acting with UCSD and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, would enter the campus in full riot gear on May 6, arresting dozens of student protesters. (It was not clear if LEMA funds covered that deployment, and UCSD did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)

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Chilling Dissent

The presence of outside law enforcement officers on campus fundamentally alters the power dynamics of a protest, said Ahamed of Palestine Legal. “ These police officers who are trained in violent tactics, you bring them to campus and they’re deploying those tactics against students. That is really dangerous,” she said.

In some cases, that meant radicalizing students who watched militarized police forces haul their classmates away. In others, it meant injuring peaceful protesters — especially at the University of California Los Angeles, according to students and faculty who spoke with The Intercept. At UCLA, university administrators tapped state emergency services funds to bring in outside law enforcement officers and arrest countless students, with many injured. UCLA did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

“They were showing us the level of militarization within these departments,” Dylan Kupsh, a fifth-year Ph.D. student at UCLA, told The Intercept. “Even since the encampment, they’ve been more and more present and bringing in other departments.”

In the face of this repression, said Corey Saylor, the research and advocacy director at Council on American-Islamic Relations, “This generation of college students is extraordinarily brave and principled. They’ve been willing to sacrifice education and career to stand on a very simple human value that genocide is wrong, that occupation is wrong, that apartheid is wrong.”

The pro-Palestine encampments presented university leaders with a publicity crisis, forcing them to choose between options ranging from letting the peaceful protests play out to quashing them with the full force of the police. Universities almost exclusively chose the latter. With encouragement from the state government, California public universities responded to the student protests less like dissent and more like a natural disaster.

Research support provided by the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations.

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