As the Trump administration escalates attacks on the pro-Palestine student movement and Israel continues the genocide in Gaza in full force, thousands are expected to partake in a mass demonstration for Palestine on April 5 in Washington DC, undeterred by repression.
Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced that he has signed off on the revocation of over 300 student visas for reasons related to pro-Palestine protest activity, raising alarms about free speech violations. “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” Rubio said at a press conference in Guyana on Thursday.
The Secretary of State declined to say by which process the individual visas arrived at his desk. “We’re not going to talk about the process by which we’re identifying it because obviously we’re looking for more people,” Rubio said. However, Rubio had previously launched an effort titled “Catch and Revoke,” which utilizes AI to scour the social media profiles of student visa holders to determine whether they have expressed support for Hamas – which the Trump administration essentially uses as euphemism for any pro-Palestine sentiments.
Emboldened by a right-wing administration in office in the US, Israel has resumed its genocide in Gaza in full force, ending a tenuous two-month ceasefire. Now, Gazans are once again facing death, destruction, and hunger, with the head of the Bakery Owners Association in the strip, Abdel Nasser al-Ajrami, reporting that all bakeries closed down on April 1 due to a shortage of flour and fuel. The death toll of the genocide now stands at over 50,000 according to Gaza’s Health Ministry (a conservative estimate). The US also re-launched airstrikes against Yemen last month.
Organizers say that now more than ever, the movement for Palestine has to be on the streets to bring Donald Trump a clear message. Peoples Dispatch spoke to students, organizers, artists, and journalists about why they are participating in the national march.
Students refuse to back down
Instead of instilling fear, the broad sweeping attacks against students who support Palestine, have re-ignited people across the country, with thousands attending marches calling for the freedom of detained student activist Mahmoud Khalil and to demand an end to Israel’s resumption of the genocide in Gaza.
“The Trump administration and the Zionist forces are trying to make our movement cower and capitulate,” said Kojo Acheampong, an undergraduate student at Harvard University who in October of 2023 was one of the main targets of a Zionist smear campaign against pro-Palestine students at the university, spearheaded by the right-wing organization Accuracy in Media.
Adam Guillette, who runs the organization, paid for a truck with an LED screen which circulated on the Harvard campus advertising the names and faces of students, including Acheampong, who were part of student groups who signed onto a statement in support of Palestine. The truck labeled these students as “Harvard’s leading antisemites.”
These attacks did not deter Acheampong, however, who has not ceased his organizing in the pro-Palestine movement on his campus. Acheampong, alongside many of his fellow students, plans to attend a march on Washington for Palestine on April 5, organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement, the ANSWER Coalition, the People’s Forum, and others.
“So many students are taking up the call to go to DC, to show in our hundreds of thousands that we don’t stand for genocide, and we also don’t stand for the attacks that are happening here domestically,” Acheampong told Peoples Dispatch. “Whether it is the abductions, whether it is ICE raids, whether it is expelling students.”
“The Trump administration is holding essentially 9 billion dollars ransom at Harvard University as a way to get the university I’m at to crack down on our movement,” Acheampong said, referring to the Trump administration’s threat to review USD 9 billion in federal contracts and grants to Harvard University over its “failure to protect students on campus from antisemitic discrimination” – actions reminiscent of the letter sent to Columbia University threatening to revoke USD 400 million in federal funds unless the administration takes drastic measures to restrict free expression on campus, all of which Columbia eventually capitulated to.
“They’re in a moment where the mass movement is strong, and they’re scared of that,” Acheampong said. “Hence why they’re trying to repress it. In moments like this, we have to mobilize in even greater numbers than ever before.”
Labor says: if we don’t fight, they win
Alongside students, many in the labor movement have been galvanized to join the movement for Palestine. “While students are being arrested for speaking up against a genocide, workers are struggling just to survive and our rights are being threatened,” said Ieisha Francis, a home care worker in Durham, North Carolina, and a part of the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW). Francis has been an organizer for a variety of labor rights issues, including fighting for heat safety on the job.
“We are spending our tax dollars on war when there are families who can’t feed their children in this country,” said Francis, who asserted that “we have to organize more than ever, because if we don’t, they win. If we don’t resist, they win.”
“The Trump administration wants to strip federal workers of their rights, take seats from the table, and drain money from the people who keep this country running,” continued Francis, referring to Trump’s recent move to strip federal employees of collective bargaining rights. “But there are only so many of them, and we gain allies every day.”
Journalists, artists, and entire movement takes a stand
Piece Whang, a member of Nodutdol for Korean Community Development, an organization of anti-imperialist Korean diaspora in the US, is joining the April 5 march in Washington, DC because “Palestine’s liberation is the only option.”
“We can’t be forced to pretend genocide is normal by the minority who profit from it,” Whang told Peoples Dispatch.
Musician and activist Carsie Blanton is encouraging other artists to attend alongside her. Blanton told Peoples Dispatch that as artists, “most of us were educated to focus our work, on our personal stories, and to focus our energy on the success of our careers.” But according to Blanton, “art is not meant to be a decoration or a commodity. Our work is not simply to ‘move people.’ We are called to move people in a specific direction: towards compassion, humanity, justice, a future.”
Journalist Rania Khalek, a host on BreakThrough News, registers her horror at the massacre of journalists in Gaza by Israeli forces. A Brown University report from April 1 revealed that since October 7, 2023, more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in “the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.”
“It is, quite simply, the worst ever conflict for reporters,” asserts the report. “Journalists, medics, doctors, teachers, everyone in Gaza is being subjected to annihilationist policies, they’re being starved, they’re being raped, they’re being tortured, and they’re being, in some cases, summarily executed, if not bombed in their homes and tents,” said Khalek.
Khalek told Peoples Dispatch, “without US weapons, Israel would not be able to continuously demolish the region. So we have to come out in support, we are in a privileged position in places across the US because for now, we still can go out into the streets. People in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Yemen, can only do so much. It’s our responsibility to stop our government from supporting these atrocities.”
Original article published in Peoples Dispatch.
