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By Travis Wayne
BOSTON, MA – On April 16, 2025, approximately forty autonomous organizers wrapped in keffiyehs, masks, and sunglasses appeared in the whipping wind on the steps outside of Boston University’s Booth Theatre. Three police cars were parked nearby and two security guards watched from inside.
After rallying in front of Booth Theater, students marched down Commonwealth Avenue to the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) building, which is centrally located on BU campus. They roared slogans outside the Tsai Performance Center, pasted fliers tagged with sharpie on the walls, and read their demands aloud to the administration. On one building, the organizers pasted the word into which all demands were crystallized across nine floor-to-ceiling windows: “SANCTUARY.”
Everything, from the anonymous nature of organizers’ dress to the purposeful pasting to the fact that every cop was greeted with the same slogan of “no justice, no peace, fuck these racist-ass police,” showed the context of the moment: BU students responding to the administration’s crackdown on campus activism with escalation. The latest attack from the administration that led students to respond was ona longtime nucleus of student organizing: YDSA at BU.
The Sanctuary Campus Campaign
The 2025 Sanctuary Campus campaign was launched by Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), the youth section of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), across the nation once Trump took power.
Students had raised the demand before. A previous generation of student organizers had fought for Sanctuary Campuses while attending classes during Trump’s first term. Students from campuses across the country led local walkouts as part of a coordinated “National Walkout for Sanctuary Campuses” to protect undocumented classmates in late 2016. Locally, Boston University’s 2017 student government endorsed the demand and urged the college president to declare Boston University a Sanctuary Campus.
The 2016-2017 Sanctuary Campus movement achieved a mishmash of results. Some universities declared themselves sanctuary campuses eight years ago only to backtrack now. Others gave in with symbolic statements designed to placate the students until they graduated. Others still did nothing. Most campuses remained vulnerable to ICE attacks, just waiting for an administration to sign off to turn a public agency into a secret police overnight.
Although the Sanctuary Campus campaign of today faces an even more emboldened ICE, the mass organization of students in YDSA has become more robust since its 2017 heyday. The campaign quickly gained traction around the country after its relaunch. At Colorado State University, YDSA gathered 3000 signatures for the demand within weeks of launch; at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, protests led by YDSA organizers broke out in late February; at Arizona State University, YDSA organizers discussed banner dropping the demand the week before YDSA at BU joined the campaign.
YDSA at BU joined in the call for a Sanctuary Campus on March 24. ICE abducted Rümeysa Öztürk the next night – March 25.
On April 3, 2025, hundreds of Boston University students and faculty walked out of classes to meet at Marsh Plaza to demand Boston University become a Sanctuary Campus. The assembly, which occurred in a location that Boston University lists at the top of its own Events and Demonstrations Policy as a free speech zone and that ironically was once supposed to be designated a “physical sanctuary” for the undocumented, was organized by YDSA after meetings with BU administrators about protecting immigrant students failed. The rally was organized in coalition with a spectrum of activist organizations including the Boston University Prison Outreach Initiative, the largest Latine student organization, Alianza, and the Boston University Grad Workers’ Union (BUGWU).
After the Sanctuary Campus rally in Marsh Plaza, autonomous students previously at the rally began a sit-in outside the office of the Dean of Students. Some students posted flyers on undesignated walls and surfaces. Despite no evidence of YDSA involvement in organizing the sit-in, administrators called in YDSA leadership for a hostile meeting six days later on April 9. According to sources present in the meeting, as well as reporting by BU’s student-run campus newspaper, the Daily Free Press, administrators attempted to convince YDSA leaders to say the chapter organized the sit-in in violation of university policy without directly alleging involvement.
Margaret Babson, Director of Student Activities, sent a follow-up email to YDSA on April 11 that lists “potential violations” by individuals “on behalf of YDSA” with no accusation or allegation against YDSA itself. Despite no evidence of YDSA official involvement, Boston University suspended YDSA.
Working Mass obtained a copy of the letter sent by Margaret Babson to YDSA, posted below:
The organization, taking to its Instagram, alleged that Boston University’s manner of handling the suspension makes one truth clear: the suspension was political.
YDSA wasn’t the first organization targeted.
One month earlier, on March 3, Boston University also shut down the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine for the same crime of pasting fliers. That followed the earlier shut-down of Students for Justice in Palestine at other campuses – like Tufts. The fact that Boston University administrators weaponized the same rule against pasting fliers to shut down two movement organizations was apparent on April 16. When autonomous organizer after organizer pasted one sticker after another on pole after wall after administrative door, righteous fury infused with joy in the air. One flier that was defiantly pasted by one participant read “No Justice, No Peace.” Another read “Your crimes will haunt you.”
Higher Education Under Attack: A Potential Elite Bargain
Boston University is cracking down on student organizers even as the Trump Administration’s gaze sits upon other institutions of higher education. The context of the move makes Boston University’s actions seem preemptive in an environment in which universities have been forced to take sides between Trump and academic freedom. Columbia University has become a collaborator with the regime’s agenda, from facilitating student deportations to surveillance of every department with even a trace of Palestinian rights. Columbia also pointedly did not sign on to a letter calling for freedom from fear of deportation organized by 200+ higher education institutions. Boston University signed on even as its crackdown on student organizations continued unabated, showing the limitations of the institutional “resistance” of higher education.
Harvard University took a different approach than either Columbia or Boston University.
The same day that Boston University sent BU YDSA their suspension letter, on April 11, the Trump Administration’s lawyers sent their own wide-ranging and revealing letter to Harvard University. Beyond the dismantling of DEI systems, retroactive targeting of Palestine student encampment organizers in 2024, and vast surveillance apparatuses to end academic freedom at Harvard, there’s one highly specific and notable demand: “reducing the power held by students and untenured faculty.” Targeting students and untenured faculty shows that the Trump Administration views the student body and the most precarious academic workers as its largest opposition to its agenda in the ivory tower.
The regime’s strategic analysis is not wrong. Students organized the Palestine encampments and occupations, high-profile actions for Palestine, and now represent an activist edge of the campus community. On April 23, Yale students relaunched their occupation in response to a visit from arch-Zionist Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose genocidal maniacism has made him one of the most extreme figures even within the Israeli government (once, he brandished a gun toward Palestinians while declaring “I am your landlord!” in Sheikh Jarrah, but most recently he has called for bullets to the head of Palestinian women and children and total Nakba in Gaza). Untenured faculty, meanwhile, are more likely to be union members than tenured faculty and have been at the center of the militant wave spreading through higher education and the labor movement.
Harvard University refused the Trump Administration’s demands, unlike Columbia. For the crime of standing up for its own institutional academic freedom, the richest university in the country now faces $2 billion in cuts in what Harvard lawyers have called a “gun to the head.” Trump not only seeks to punish Harvard with draconian cuts that threaten thousands of workers with jobs directly or indirectly funded by Harvard across the Greater Boston area; his regime even threatens to seize, by unnamed means, the institution’s tax-exempt status.
The Trump Administration is placing its thumb on the scale of class struggle on campus. The federal government is pressuring institutions to shift power away from the most progressive campus sections and return it to the most elite: tenured, appointed, institutionalized, free from popular pressure. Under this program, student organizing is to be viewed suspiciously and its organizations crushed when daring to organize for taboo causes – like ending genocide.
That means Trump’s agenda, in some respects, dovetails with the interests of the existing campus elite. Administrations have faced millions of dollars in endowment losses, individual careers in the higher education administrative class unsettled, as a result of the student movement for a free Palestine in 2024. The material interest that campus authorities have in quieting student disruption at institutional and individual levels poses a far greater incentive for repression than top-down orders from the White House alone.
In their April 12 statement, BU YDSA summarized their perspective on the relationship between the Trump administration and “bourgeois academia,” the day after receiving the letter suspending the organization from the Student Activities Office:
The administrative class which formed around these academic institutions is panicking, threatened from above by the capitalist state and threatened from below by increasingly class-conscious students. As a result the universities are lashing out wildly in the only way they can.
One BU YDSA member who asked to remain anonymous pointed to BU’s choice to cut PhD programs in the humanities and social sciences in response to BUGWU’s victory and new contract following their historic 2024 seven-month strike. Boston University then “asked departments to basically crowd-fund themselves” as austerity cuts hit departments across the university.
“They’re in an impossible situation,” the YDSA member said. “The bourgeoisie aren’t able to hold academia anymore. For the ruling class, it’s just fat that needs to be cut out. So the administrative class assigned to run things is clearly panicking, and at the same time, there’s a student movement that neither the university nor the government likes that they’d like cut.”
Under these conditions, repression becomes an elite bargain.
Forward Stronger
“Mahmoud Khalil,” were the first words from the first speaker’s megaphone, before the crowd marched down Commonwealth Avenue on April 16. Then: “Rümeysa Öztürk.”
The Sanctuary Campus campaign shows no sign of faltering as a result of YDSA’s suspension. “We aren’t gonna let them do this to us!” said the first anonymous orator on April 16, after invoking the names of just a few students kidnapped by the secret police.
Another anonymous Boston University YDSA member pointed to a student leader uninvolved in the core of the organizing project raising the Sanctuary Campus demand to administrators at the annual Student Leaders’ Dinner. Administrators were embarrassed enough to censor the student leader’s presentation. “Clearly the campaign is effective enough that the university feels compelled to ban us from waging it,” said the BU YDSA member. “They feel the need to retaliate against us as an institution.”
Evan Caldwell, national YDSA organizer, noted to Working Mass that administrative repression often strengthens YDSA chapters. Guerrilla tabling is one method students can use to overcome tabling restrictions caused by suspensions. Other organizations can also support YDSA in booking meeting spaces. On campus, that can look like coalition partners; off campus, DSA chapters can book physical space close to the university for YDSA members to strategize from. “So many chapters have gone through this and emerged stronger,” said Caldwell.
The Sanctuary Campus demand seems poised to only grow as the Trump Administration continues its attacks on undocumented students and workers. More and more administrative classes will be forced to choose a side. For one BU YDSA member, the eventual decision of the universities stuck between Trump and the student movement is obvious:
They’ll pretend as long as they can that they’ll protect students. But in the end, they will capitulate to the threat from above.
Travis Wayne is the deputy managing editor of Working Mass and the co-chair of the Somerville branch of Boston DSA.
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