At 4:30 a.m. on April 24, 2024, students gathered in Alumni Park to protest the University’s financial and academic ties to Israel among other things. This was the beginning of an over-11-day-long encampment in which the Los Angeles Police Department arrested 93 people, including 51 students.

One year later, echoes of the occupation remain. The University fully enclosed itself with permanent fencing and has new entrance protocols such as ID checks to enter campus and additional internal fences, such as the ones around Alumni Park.

“It’s really awful to see now the kinds of fences and walls that have been put up and the place where, just last year, there were such amazing kinds of teachings and actions happening for justice,” said a member of USC Faculty for Justice in Palestine, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the University. 

The protests began with yoga and meditation, poetry reading, and “daily Palestine updates.” Then, canopies and tents with signs were erected as protesters continued chanting and giving speeches over a megaphone. 

The hanging of signs on trees, lamp posts and poles stuck into the ground was the first flashpoint of tension between encampment protesters and DPS. Half an hour into the official start of the protest, Student Affairs relayed — through DPS officers — that if signs weren’t taken down willingly, then they would be taken down by force. 

Department of Public Safety officers entered the encampment at 11:30 a.m. and began seizing tents, causing protesters to lift them off the ground and march with them around Alumni Park. Several campus buildings were closed and protestors scuffled with DPS officers. 

More than 12 hours into the first day of the encampment, at least 50 LAPD officers appeared on campus, dressed in riot gear and armed with 40-millimeter less-lethal launchers, sponge batons and zip ties. Some protesters began writing phone numbers on their arms so they knew whom to call if arrested. 

Then, some 100 protesters at Alumni Park locked arms as helicopters overhead repeated warnings from Department of Public Safety Chief Lauretta Hill that those who remained would be arrested for trespassing. They chanted slogans including “disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,” and “free, free, free Palestine.”

A media liaison from USC Student Coalition Against Labor Exploitation — a group not affiliated with the University — who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the University and law enforcement, said they were shocked by how quick the response had been.

“I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve literally never seen this many cops with my own eyes,’” the media liaison said. “I was disappointed, but not surprised that USC mobilized such an immediate and ultimately violent response against student protesters.”

In an interview with the Daily Trojan and Annenberg Media in March, President Carol Folt said she wanted to prioritize the safety of the campus community. She said people wrote to her saying they were in fear of the encampment and so she decided to call the LAPD.

“The last thing any president ever wants to do is to call the police, but at that moment, it felt like we needed to do this to get ourselves in a place where we could keep people safe,” Folt said.

The majority of the 93 protesters arrested by LAPD were arrested for misdemeanors such as trespassing, and Dina Chehata, the Council on American-Islamic Relations-L.A.’s civil rights managing attorney, said the statute of limitations for those charges have expired. 

“Typically, prosecutors will have one year from the day of arrest to charge,” Chehata said on April 24. “My hope is that this day finishes without us hearing anything about anyone being charged.”

Tara McPherson, a member of USC Faculty for Justice in Palestine and the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation-endowed chair for the study of censorship in media, said that she feels that the University is constantly reminding students and the community that campus is not freely available, especially with people being “surveilled entering campus.”

“To have [Alumni Park] fenced off, that’s ridiculous,” McPherson said. “There should not be a structure of internal barriers on campus limiting access to green space and to lawns that students have been able to freely occupy in a variety of ways from picnics to protest for years.”

The University updated various policies, guidelines and rules at the beginning of the academic year, a University statement to the Daily Trojan read. These updates included clarifying the necessity of having reservations for events, emphasizing that students cannot destroy another group’s flyers and refining the process for planning protests or demonstrations. 

Though USC as a private university is not directly required to abide by the First Amendment, the Leonard Law — a California state law — holds private universities to the same standards as public universities when it comes to students’ freedom of speech. Chehata said the law is “complex,” but claimed it’s likely USC violated students’ First Amendment rights.

“[The Leonard Law] prevents private campuses like USC from punishing their students for engaging in First Amendment-protected activities,” Chehata said. “[USC] can say ‘The First Amendment doesn’t actually apply to us, and we have the right to regulate speech as we see fit.’”

SCALE’s media liaison said they do not think another encampment will be possible due to the increased surveillance on campus. For now, the liaison said the group plans to put pressure on USC in any capacity it can, with its main focus now on protesting at USC Village.

The anonymous member of FJP said the organization wants to promote education on topics such as academic freedom and repression by hosting screenings and panels. Recently, it held a panel which included a member of the Irvine 11, a group of students arrested in 2010 for disrupting a speech given by the Israeli ambassador to the United States.

“Hearing that person’s continued resolve for this cause decades later was a really powerful reminder to me that there are ways to keep on going and keep the movement moving forward,” the FJP member said.

McPherson encouraged students to continue to resist the gates and fences that surround campus and to demand better from senior administration. 

“[The] encampment feels like a moment in time — like it happened and it’s over — because it was extremely visible, but this is an ongoing movement,” SCALE’s media liaison said. “There’ll be moments of visibility, but there’s always work going on behind the scenes … to make USC a university that actually serves its students, serves its faculty, serves its staff and serves the South Central community instead of millionaires and billionaires.”