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Columbia Students Arrested For Storming Library Include Several Repeat Offenders — Including Grad Student Who Demanded Humanitarian Aid from University w/@LevineJonathan 🧵

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.

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.

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.

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."

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." 

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."

Darazim, a sophomore majoring in Middle Eastern studies, penned a January 2024 piece in the Columbia Spectatorattacking Columbia and her fellow students for not taking an aggressive stance against Israel’s retaliation following Oct. 7. 

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. 

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."

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"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."