Eight people who federal prosecutors said had ties to the University of Michigan were accused in an indictment unsealed on Wednesday of threatening campus leaders and others to sever ties with Israel.
The indictment in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan accused the pro-Palestinian activists of crossing the line from campus protest to a series of illegal acts that included threats and vandalism. The eight defendants faced varying charges, but the indictment included federal counts of conspiracy to transmit threats, witness intimidation and destruction of property to prevent seizure.
“Their criminal activity included spray-painting threats, breaking windows and throwing glass jars filled with noxious chemicals into family homes,” the indictment said. “They marked their victims with threatening symbols used by Hamas, including red inverted triangles and red handprints. They used the internet and social media to broadcast their message to ensure their threats and commitment to continuing criminal activity were heard by their victims and others who support Israel.”
The Trump administration has taken a hard line against pro-Palestinian protesters, whose activism after Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza led to tumult on university campuses across the country.
But the charges in Michigan, all felonies that carry the possibility of years in prison upon conviction, appeared to signify a shift in the federal government’s approach. Until now, the administration had mostly focused on targeting universities themselves over their response to protesting students, although it did move to strip visas and deport some individual students last year.
Activists had opposed those tactics, saying that the administration was trying to limit free speech and target its political opponents. Critics accused the administration of conflating criticism of Israeli and U.S. policies with antisemitism.
Thousands of people were arrested at the peak of the campus protest movement in 2024, but those cases generally resulted in relatively minor charges in state courts or no charges at all.
Among the most serious charges filed in state court were felonies against Stanford protesters in connection to an incident in which demonstrators broke into the office of the university president and barricaded themselves inside. A California jury deadlocked on those charges earlier this year.
A spokeswoman for the University of Michigan did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Court records did not make clear whether the defendants had hired lawyers, and none of them could be immediately reached for comment. Six of the people charged in the indictment were described by prosecutors as residents of Michigan: Paige E. Feyock, 26; Amatullah A. Hakim, 21; Zainab A. Hakim, 23; Mariam M. Odeh, 24; Colin H. Weger, 24; and Jonathan H. Zou, 22. Ahmet K. Korkaya, 28, of Wisconsin, and Alexander M. Sepulveda, 23, of Illinois, were also charged.
Many of the defendants had been publicly associated with campus protests at Michigan in recent years, and some of them had been identified as members of pro-Palestinian campus groups. At least six of the eight defendants had identified themselves online as University of Michigan students, and a seventh had worked as a researcher there. At least two of them appeared to have written opinion pieces in The Michigan Daily, a campus publication, expressing support for the Palestinian cause or anger over university policies.
“The university maintains deep ties with Israeli institutions that fund research and develop technologies for the genocide in Gaza,” said an opinion piece published in December and co-authored by Amatullah Hakim.
One of the defendants, Mr. Zou, appears to be the same person who sued the University of Michigan last year over being banned from campus for his actions during a pro-Palestinian protest. That lawsuit, which was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan and another group, accused the university of a heavy-handed response to campus protests.
“These trespass bans have upended plaintiffs’ daily lives, disrupted their education and work, and are blocking their ability to speak and protest freely on the university’s vast campus,” the lawsuit said.
