Pro-Palestine demonstrators sue Auraria Campus police, alleging last year’s arrests violated First Amendment
Eight Coloradans arrested during last year’s pro-Palestine demonstrations on Denver’s multi-college Auraria Campus are suing police over the break-up of the protest, alleging their arrests were unlawful and in violation of their free speech rights.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Denver District Court, comes as hundreds of foreign students across the country — some who have been linked to pro-Palestine activism — are facing deportation and visa revocation by the Trump administration.
The complaint names as defendants Chief Jason Mollendor and six other members of the Auraria Campus Police Department involved in last year’s arrests on the campus, home to the University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver and Community College of Denver.
“The truth is that the arrests on April 26, 2024, were never about enforcing campus policies, they were about punishing protesters for their views,” the lawsuit, brought by the Rathod Mohamedbhai law firm, states.
Devra Ashby, director of communications and marketing for Auraria Higher Education Center, said campus officials had not yet been served with the lawsuit Wednesday.
“We are committed to following the appropriate legal processes and will respond through the proper legal channels should we receive notice,” Ashby said.
The plaintiffs — an MSU Denver professor, two CU Denver faculty members, two CU Denver students and three Colorado residents — all either had their charges dismissed by the Denver City Attorney’s Office or entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the City Attorney’s Office that led to the dismissal of their charges.
“I was taught by this university that we are supposed to raise our voices when injustices are happening,” said plaintiff Sarah Napier, 25, a CU Boulder graduate who joined the protest to advocate for the CU system to divest from Israel.
“I took many classes on civil disobedience at CU and felt called by my personal beliefs that I should be there protesting the university’s complicity in genocide,” she said. “They’re not upholding what they’re teaching. They can’t be educating students and then silencing the truth.”
Encampment met with arrests
On April 25, several hundred pro-Palestine demonstrators established an encampment on the grassy lawn of Auraria’s Tivoli Quad. The Denver protest, which included tents and demonstrators peacefully assembling, was born out of a wave of student activism and college encampments across the country protesting Israel’s war in Gaza.
Demonstrators pledged to stay until University of Colorado officials divested from activities and funding related to Israel.
“Rather than respecting the constitutional rights of those gathered, law enforcement, including officers from the Denver Police Department and the Auraria Campus Police Department, abrogated well-established First Amendment rights through intimidation and mass arrests,” the lawsuit states.
According to the lawsuit, police justified the arrests of students, faculty and other demonstrators as necessary to enforce Auraria’s camping ban that prohibits tents — a policy the plaintiffs’ attorneys said was enacted in 2004 following a protest against the Iraq War in which students set up tents on campus.
The timing of the policy indicated it was created “not as a neutral regulation, but as a tool to restrict expressive conduct and limit speech on campus,” the lawsuit states.
On April 26, Skip Spear, general counsel and chief administrative officer for Auraria Higher Education Center, told several protesters their tents violated campus policy and they needed to leave, the lawsuit alleges.
“It was a peaceful protest,” Napier said. “We were just there with signs and tents. Students were still able to go to classes. It wasn’t disrupting the normal flow of the university.”
The lawsuit alleges Spear did not tell all of the gathered protesters that they needed to leave, nor did he say that they could continue to demonstrate if they removed the tents. Spear then contacted Chief Mollendor, who declared the protest “unlawful” and deployed law enforcement, according to the lawsuit.
The eight plaintiffs, in their lawsuit, contend the Auraria demonstrators did not violate laws or campus policy, other than a few unidentified protesters who set up tents.
“By refusing to allow protesters to move away from the tents and continue their protest, Chief Mollendor made clear that he was there to shut down the protest rather than simply ensure the removal of tents,” the lawsuit states.
Mollendor issued a dispersal warning that failure to leave could result in arrest, the lawsuit said. That order was unlawful, the plaintiffs’ attorneys argue, because “it failed to instruct demonstrators to remove the tents, instead broadly prohibiting all speech on Auraria Campus.”
The lawsuit said officers began dismantling tents and arresting seated protesters who had linked arms. Seven out of the eight plaintiffs were charged with trespass and failure to obey a lawful order, while one protester, CU Denver lecturer Joie Ha, was charged with interference and failure to obey a lawful order.
Denver and Auraria police arrested around 40 people for trespassing and resisting arrest on April 26.
Despite the tents being removed at that time — the only alleged policy violation — the lawsuit said police continued arresting people.
“Once the tents were removed, the protest was entirely lawful and protected under the First Amendment,” the lawsuit states. “The decision to proceed with arrests after the fact demonstrates that the objective was to suppress the protest and retaliate against the protesters.”
The lawsuit noted that a week after the arrests, Denver police Chief Ron Thomas said during a Citizen Oversight Board meeting that he refused to aid in clearing the encampment because there was “no legal way” to do it unless the protest “truly does something that creates an unlawful assembly” and that they weren’t “going to go in and sweep out this peaceful protest just because they’re occupying a space on campus that you’d like to use for something else right now.”
The demonstrators re-occupied the Tivoli Quad after the arrests and stayed 23 days until the campus ordered the dispersal of the encampment.
“This is democracy in action”
Plaintiff Alex Boodrookas, an MSU Denver professor who teaches Middle Eastern history, said he joined the protesters after walking past the encampment on his way back from a faculty meeting and seeing riot police.
“The police presence was stunning,” Boodrookas said. “There were police cars everywhere, fully armored, and armed police and this was a peaceful protest. The dangerous thing that day was the presence of the police. Other than that, the protesters were holding talks and craft circles.”
Attorney Azra Taslimi, who is representing the plaintiffs, said it’s an important time to bring this lawsuit forward amid the federal government’s targeting of student activists.
“It’s a dangerous message to send out to the public at large that there is some speech that is going to be protected and some that when it challenges government, what our country’s policies are, that is going to be met with police oppression,” Taslimi said. “We are seeing a dangerous unraveling of the rule of law across the country.”
Last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. State Department already had revoked 300 or more visas from international students across the country as the Trump administration largely targets foreign-born students who have objected to Israel’s war in Gaza.
In Colorado, the Trump administration has revoked at least 22 international students’ visas, including 10 students at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and 12 students across the University of Colorado’s four campuses. It’s unclear why these students — whose identities and countries of origin have not been released — were targeted.
“Student protests are not a disruption of education, they are a reflection of it,” Taslimi said. “This is what civic engagement looks like. This is democracy in action.”
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