The No Detention Centers in Michigan coalition extends our full solidarity to students and alumni at the University of Michigan who face vindictive new disciplinary charges from the Board of Regents as a result of their opposition to Israeli apartheid and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The U-M Board of Regents has charged eleven current and former undergraduate and graduate students with disciplinary infractions through the Office of Student Conflict Resolution, or OSCR, for alleged participation in protests that took place in 2024. Following the withdrawal of criminal charges brought last year by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, and in the wake of revelations that the university had used undercover private security agents to spy on student activists, the administration is now engaging in retaliatory tactics to target high-profile students, including several who recently defeated those same state-level charges. The University of Michigan Police Department is partnering with a new “Office of Student Accountability” within OSCR to expand punitive measures and to impose guilty verdicts, with students facing sanctions ranging from disciplinary probation to lifetime bans on enrolling at U-M. These measures are part of a broader pattern of repression established by the Board of Regents, which threatens both the futures of individual students and the ability of all students and supporters to engage in protest on campus.

The OSCR charges—which, as organizers have warned, involve a conspicuous absence of due process—arrive at a moment when material links between Israel’s genocide and the authoritarian kidnapping regime of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have become clearer than ever in the public consciousness. In a statement of solidarity with the people of Colombia and Palestine published during the 2021 bombing of Gaza, No Detention Centers in Michigan noted that “all movements against oppression and carceral power are connected.” That statement also specifically highlighted the use of administrative detention—imprisonment without charge or trial—by both the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Israeli occupation. The same comparison was drawn this past March by Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil, in a letter dictated from inside a Louisiana detention center owned and operated by the GEO Group, the company that now profits from a contract with ICE at the reopened North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin. Rümeysa Öztürk—a Tufts University doctoral student who, like Khalil, was abducted by federal agents earlier this year because of her advocacy for Palestine, and was held for months in a GEO Group facility—wrote last week: “I am free, but my true freedom is interlinked with the freedom of many women I lived alongside in ICE prison.”

We avow that the freedom of all immigrants is interlinked with the movement for Palestinian liberation, and we honor the students and workers in Michigan and around the world who have fought to raise awareness of their universities’ financial complicity in the destruction of Palestinian life and have pushed for divestment. In the case of U-M, as in many others, investments in venture capital and hedge funds tie the university not only to the Israeli military but also to surveillance systems used by ICE as they extend their anti-immigrant violence further into Lake County and around the state. It is this complicity, not the efforts of students to bring it to light and to change course, that must be resisted. Whether they originate from the Michigan Attorney General’s office or from within the University of Michigan administration, attempts to intimidate, punish, and silence these student activists must end. NDCM amplifies the demands of student organizers at U-M and calls upon the university administration and the U-M Board of Regents to take the following steps:

• Drop all OSCR disciplinary charges against students involved in pro-Palestine activism.
• Restore due-process protections in student disciplinary proceedings.
• End collaboration with undercover security contractors targeting student activists.
• Publicly account for U-M’s investments in companies implicated in both Israeli apartheid and genocide, and the U.S. detention and deportation machine, and divest immediately.

NDCM is proud to stand in solidarity with all student protesters facing administrative repression for their opposition to settler colonialism and genocide, and we look forward to witnessing both the abolition of ICE and a free Palestine within our lifetimes.