Police surrounded a pro-Palestinian encampment early Sunday at the University of Southern California, days before commencement events are set to begin on the Los Angeles campus.
\nThe university said the Los Angeles Police Department was clearing the area.
\n\u201cIf you are in the centre of campus, please leave. People who don\u2019t leave could be arrested,\u201d USC said on the social media platform X.
\nProtesters were loudly chanting \u201cFree Palestine\u201d inside the encampment. Protesters in the encampment were given 15 minutes to leave the area before facing arrest, according to Annenberg Media, a student-led campus publication.
\nThe encampment had restarted after the Los Angeles Police Department first arrested 93 people on April 24. The atmosphere on the private university campus had largely remained calm since, while attention turned to arrests at the University of California, Los Angeles.
\nAt the University of Virginia, 25 people were arrested Saturday for trespassing after police clashed with pro-Palestinian protesters who refused to remove tents from campus, and demonstrators at the University of Michigan chanted anti-war messages and waved flags during commencement ceremonies.
\nUSC, a private university, has been the subject of student protests over the war in Gaza as well as the administration\u2019s decision to cancel a commencement speech by the valedictorian, a Muslim student who had expressed support for Palestinians.
\nThe university made that decision in mid-April, saying they had safety concerns after receiving threats. Some Jewish groups had criticized the student\u2019s selection as speaker.
\nAdministrators later canceled the entire main-stage commencement planned for May 10, when 65,000 people were expected to gather to celebrate graduates.
\nOther commencement activities, including graduation ceremonies for individual schools and colleges, are still scheduled from Thursday through Sunday. Access to the private campus has largely been restricted for people not affiliated with the university since late April.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Police surrounded a pro-Palestinian encampment early Sunday at the University of Southern California, days before commencement events are set to begin on the Los Angeles campus. The university said the Los Angeles Police Department was clearing the area. \u201cIf you are in the centre of campus, please leave. People who don\u2019t leave could be arrested,\u201d …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20893,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20888"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20894,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20888\/revisions\/20894"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}