FBI raids home of Palestinian American over campus graffiti during Gaza protest

More than 80 student and faculty groups from across the country, including pro-Palestine organisations on US campuses, are urging authorities in a letter sent on Tuesday to investigate what led the FBI to raid the home of two Gaza protest leaders last month.

Two Palestinian-American sisters who are also students at George Mason University (GMU) in Virginia had their home raided by the FBI. The house was searched for six hours and their electronic devices were seized, according to a new report by The Intercept on Tuesday.

More than a dozen police officers, as well as a member of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, arrived at the family home in Springfield, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC, in the early morning hours of 7 November and broke down the door. They forced the family to sit in the living room as the house was searched.  

Officers refused to show the family a search warrant but told them the investigation concerned spray-painted graffiti on the GMU campus related to a protest against Israel's war on Gaza. At the time, the university had publicised a $2,000 reward for information on any suspects. 

While they were not arrested during the raid, one of the two sisters in the home is the current co-president of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at GMU. The other is a former president, The Intercept reported. 

They were both banned from GMU in September, shortly after the graffiti incident, with police citing “criminal trespass”. The sisters have not been able to continue their education. The SJP chapter has also since been suspended. 

In addition to a thorough investigation of how they became targets, Tuesday’s letter from ally organisations and faculty demanded the trespass orders be revoked and that their devices and SJP be reinstated. 

LET GMU KNOW THAT WE DEMAND THEY REINSTATE SJP AT MASON AND ALLOW STUDENT ORGANIZERS TO RETURN TO CAMPUS!https://t.co/wUOp90Qq9M pic.twitter.com/f360yCmg7K

— National Students for Justice in Palestine (@NationalSJP) December 3, 2024

The letter also indicated that the raid was an overreach. 

“Do universities such as GMU routinely send phalanxes of police officers in military fatigues and armored vehicles, and carrying assault rifles, to break down the front door and raid the homes of students during the pre-dawn hours over an allegation of spray painting?” the letter reads. 

“Do administrators routinely rush to judgment and issue criminal trespass orders - the kind used to exclude serial sexual predators and stalkers from campus - against students who have been accused of graffiti?”

“It appears that the answers to these questions may increasingly be ‘yes’.”

The incident in Virginia is the latest in a wave of crackdowns on pro-Palestine protesters across the US. In October, a University of Pennsylvania student’s home was also raided. Other academic institutions have suspended students or barred them from the university for good. 

“I’m worried for our students and I’m concerned for our schools,” GMU professor and SJP faculty advisor Ben Manski said, as cited by The Intercept. 

“There are still no allegations and no charges that I’m aware of [for the two sisters]. Without those, we can’t have due process, we don’t know what is behind these actions, and we can’t know whether the public interest is being served or harmed.”

The attorney for the family in the GMU case described the raid as “authoritarian overreach”.

“It’s clear that the university and police - local and federal - are working in tandem to intimidate, penalize, and criminalize student activism around Palestine,” Abdel-Rahman Hamed told The Intercept.