The crowd at the Board of Regents meeting during public comment. May 16, 2024. (Photo by Leila Chapa for The Daily Lobo / Source NM)
Students at the University of New Mexico told the people who govern their campus about injuries inflicted on protesters by police, including one that required a hospital visit, and reiterated their demand for administrators to dump the institution’s investments connected to the state of Israel.
At public comment during the UNM Board of Regents meeting Thursday, Rakin Faruk, described the harms she saw done by the UNM Police Department and New Mexico State Police at the Duck Pond the day before.
Faruk, president of UNM College Democrats, said police on Wednesday detained one of her fellow protesters using a zip tie “so tight, that when the police tried to take the zip ties off of her, they slit her wrists yesterday, and she was taken to the hospital.”
Public comment is set up so that there isn’t an exchange between the regents and the person speaking. And no regent responded in any way to what was said about the protests during public comment.
In response to Source New Mexico’s questions, university spokesperson Cinnamon Blair characterized the injury differently.
Blair, who was present south of the protest on Wednesday behind police, said it was “a minor injury to their hand” and said that person was “treated by rescue and transported to UNM-H at their request.”
Blair said information from medical evaluations of people who were arrested “would not necessarily be shared with us.” She said whenever UNM PD uses force, their standard operating procedures require that force to be documented and reviewed, but State Police have “their own documentation and review process.”
“No complaints regarding injury have been filed with UNMPD or via UNM Ethics Point hotline,” Blair said.
Ethics Point is an internal complaint system that the university community can use to share instances where someone might violate campus policies. Blair said anyone with issues about how UNM handled the protest at the encampment can use that system to seek accountability.
Ethics Point was also one of the many tools used to compile alleged campus misconduct violations during the 23 days the camp was at the Duck Pond, Blair said. Ultimately, those violations were all listed as part of UNM’s justification to issue the trespassing order that led to several violent arrests.
Faruk said police forcibly removed another protester’s hijab.
“We had journalists and photographers arrested with no charge beyond taking pictures of the camp, which is an astounding connection back to the journalists and photographers who are being arrested and murdered in Palestine every day,” Faruk said.
Those media workers, an independent investigative journalist Bryant Furlow and his wife, photographer Tara Armijo-Prewitt, spent about 12 hours inside the Metropolitan Detention Center outside Albuquerque on Wednesday.
In a written statement, Furlow said when he arrived at the Duck Pond, he asked police where news media were allowed to stand to document, but didn’t get an answer. The statement was published on the New Mexico In Depth website, where Furlow is a contributor. The news outlet, and Furlow’s bylines, have been republished by Source New Mexico.
“I asked officers several times if there was a public information officer on scene with whom I could speak and was told there was not,” Furlow said. “I also inquired about who was in charge but got no response.”
At all times, Furlow said he and Armijo-Prewitt followed police instructions and stayed behind the yellow police tape.
“We were arrested while photographing the operation and shortly after asking an NMSP officer for his badge number and name,” Furlow said. “As I was being arrested, I said I was a member of the press repeatedly and loudly.”
How can you invest in the systems that are causing the very thing that you refuse to even name?
– Farah Al Qawasmi, a Palestinian medical student at UNM
Faruk pointed out UNM President Garnett Stokes did not mention any injuries in her campus-wide email later that afternoon.
“She said that there was not enough evidence for her to have said in her email that our students were hurt,” Faruk said. “Less than 24 hours later, she called the same riot cops to the camp.”
“Their blood is on your hands,” Faruk said.
Farah Al Qawasmi, a Palestinian medical student at UNM who lives in Albuquerque, said Stokes also left out of her emails to the student body “the very thing that we are protesting.”
“Even if I try to understand that UNM ‘should not serve as a political tool to express institutional opinions on intricate social and geopolitical matters,’ how can you invest in the systems that are causing the very thing that you refuse to even name?” Al Qawasmi said. “I will name it for you: You are investing in a racist apartheid regime that is committing a genocide in Gaza.”
Stokes at the meeting on Thursday characterized what’s happening in Gaza as “immeasurable human suffering.”
“Everyone in leadership at this institution recognizes the tragedy that has unfolded,” Stokes said.
Stokes signed the notice to vacate handed to protesters on Wednesday. At the regents meeting she said UNM has a long tradition of supporting students’ rights to free speech and peaceful assembly.
“We’ve also as an institution worked hard to balance its deference for free speech with its responsibilities to protect our students, our faculty, our staff, and our infrastructure from harm,” Stokes said.
Faculty Senate President Cris Elder told the regents that university administrations have historically responded to conflicts on campus “with militarized force.”
“I believe inviting police, particularly state troopers, in riot gear, with guns and mace — and in 2017, prior to this administration, on horseback, with tear gas and armored vehicles — puts us all in danger, but particularly those from marginalized communities that make up the greatest demographic on our campus,” Coleman said.
Al Qawasmi told the regents the administration chose to take down the solidarity camp on the 76th anniversary of the Nakba, the Arabic term for the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from what became Israel in 1948.
“This is a reminder that the settler colonial mentality remains deeply rooted today,” Al Qawasmi said. “It is absolutely a moral injury being a member of a university that would rather brutalize and oppress their students than support their Palestinian students. You must divest from death.”
Editor Shaun Griswold contributed reporting to this story.
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