About a dozen police officers and FBI agents raided the home of two female students at George Mason University (GMU) in Northern Virginia in the early hours of November, conducting a search and seizure for hours.
According to The Intercept, more than a dozen officers raided the home of two Palestinian female students at George Mason University in Springfield, Virginia, in the early hours of November 7, searching the home for about six hours and confiscating electronic devices, including cell phones and computers. The students, however, were not arrested.
According to the report, the officers who responded that day did not show a search warrant, one of them was an agent of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the raid was reportedly due to the female students’ pro-Palestinian activities, particularly “graffiti” painted on the campus during protests the Gaza Strip.
Immediately after the graffiti was discovered, the university offered a $2,000 reward for information about the students who wrote the graffiti, and the female students were banned from the school.
One of the female students searched was an undergraduate student and the other was a graduate student, and all of them were current or former executives of the pro-Palestinian student group ‘SJP’.
As this fact became known, students and faculty members protested, saying that the federal agents’ intervention was excessive. It is reported that a group of about 80 pro-Palestinian students and faculty members from around the country sent a letter to the relevant authorities on the 3rd protesting the search and seizure and the ban on students’ access to the school.