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 lawsuit 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 were not yet aware of the lawsuit Wednesday morning.
“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.
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