Hirsi has a partnership with Adidas and has shared social-media posts justifying October 7.
Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), was handcuffed and led away from the site of an anti-Israel encampment on Columbia University’s campus by New York Police Department officers on Thursday, photographs show.
Hirsi was one of over 100 protesters cuffed and removed from the premises on Thursday afternoon after Columbia students occupied the university’s lawn for over 24 hours in violation of school policies, the New York Post reported, noting that NYPD officers in riot gear brought cuffed students — some of whom resisted detention — to corrections buses. NYPD reportedly warned the students that they would be arrested if they did not vacate the area.
The department is expected to provide more information about the situation in a Thursday evening press conference.
Before police escorted her from the quad, Hirsi announced on social media Thursday that she had been suspended from Barnard College as a result of her involvement with anti-Israel protests.
“i’m an organizer with CU Apartheid Divest @ColumbiaSJP, in my 3 years at @BarnardCollege i have never been reprimanded or received any disciplinary warnings,” Hirsi wrote on X. “i just received notice that i am 1 of 3 students suspended for standing in solidarity with Palestinians facing a genocide.”
Hirsi, who has a Soviet hammer and sickle in her account bio on X, followed the announcement with a post referring to the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” and said she and her fellow activists “will stand resolute until our demands are met.” Those demands “include divestment from companies complicit in genocide, transparency of @Columbia’s investments and FULL amnesty for all students facing repression,” she wrote.
The “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” as National Review reported Wednesday, was composed of dozens of tents on Columbia University’s campus. A university spokesperson told the student-run Columbia Spectator that “the presence of tents on South Lawn is a safety concern and a violation of university policies,” writing that the university was in the process of “informing the students they are in violation of university policies and for their own safety and for the operation of the university they need to leave.”
Columbia University Apartheid Divest, in addition to organizing the encampment, called for students to gather outside the area of the lawn to prevent police from entering and led chants calling for “intifada revolution” and for Hamas to “kill another soldier now.” The occupation of the quad, which began at around 4 a.m. local time, lasted over 24 hours before the university began clearing protesters from the lawn.
Both Columbia president Minouche Shafik — who was in Washington, D.C., testifying in front of the House Education and Workforce Committee on campus antisemitism while her students occupied university grounds — and Barnard leadership issued statements Thursday addressing the suspensions.
“This morning, I had to make a decision that I hoped would never be necessary. I have always said that the safety of our community was my top priority and that we needed to preserve an environment where everyone could learn in a supportive context,” Shafik wrote. “Out of an abundance of concern for the safety of Columbia’s campus, I authorized the New York Police Department to begin clearing the encampment from the South Lawn of Morningside campus that had been set up by students in the early hours of Wednesday morning.”
Noting that the students who set up the tents “violated a long list of rules and policies,” Shafik wrote that the students received warnings that they would face suspension if they remained on the lawn.
“I regret that all of these attempts to resolve the situation were rejected by the students involved. As a result, NYPD officers are now on campus and the process of clearing the encampment is underway,” she wrote in the statement.
Barnard’s leadership similarly wrote that the university requested that students leave the lawn, warning those students that they would be subject to disciplinary action if they did not comply.
“This morning, April 18, we started to place identified Barnard students remaining in the encampment on interim suspension, and we will continue to do so,” the letter reads.
Hirsi has a partnership with Adidas and is listed on the company’s website as a “community mentor.” Adidas says it chooses its partners “for their ability to make positive change in their own communities” and describes Hirsi as “a leading Black youth in the climate activism arena.” She was profiled in Teen Vogue in 2020 as a star online activist and national organizer.
Hirsi, like her mother, is a vocal opponent of the existence of the state of Israel and on October 7 shared a post on X from Mohammed El-Kurd that claimed the Hamas attack was “a response to weeks and months and years of daily Israeli military invasions into Palestinian towns, killings of Palestinians, and the very fact that millions of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are besieged under Israeli blockade.”