Student files civil rights suit against U-M alleging retaliation for support of Palestinian rights

A University of Michigan student is taking the college’s leadership to court, accusing officials of collaborating with a private security company to engage in a campaign of surveillance and harassment in retaliation for his advocacy in support of the rights of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, territories occupied by Israel. 

Josiah Walker is one of the five students interviewed by The Guardian, who said they were followed, recorded and eavesdropped on by undercover investigators from City Shield, a Detroit-based security service.

“Public universities ought to be places where people can be critical of foreign governments without facing undue harms to the integrity of their persons, interests, and property,” Walker said in a statement Thursday. “The University of Michigan’s decision to mobilize public and private assets to suppress my viewpoints was dangerously irresponsible and constitutes a profound act of institutional betrayal that must be rectified.”

In the complaint filed by the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice, Walker, who is Black and Muslim, accused the university of discriminating against him for his advocacy for Palestinian rights.

“Defendants acted against Plaintiff Walker because of the content of his speech and the viewpoints he expressed, as well as his racial and religious identities,” the suit reads. “As a result, Defendants subjected Mr. Walker to a deliberate and unlawful pattern of harassment and retaliation.”

When asked about the suit, Paul Corliss, the university’s assistant vice president for public affairs and internal communications said “no comment.”

In response to Walker’s actions protesting Israel’s war on Gaza, which a United Nations independent commission and the human rights group Amnesty international have labeled a genocide, the university “carried out a series of punitive conduct designed to intimidate and retaliate against him.”

According to the suit, this conduct includes, among other allegations: 

• The commissioning of prolonged, harassing, and intrusive surveillance by a private security contractor.
• Detaining Walker without reasonable suspicion of him having committed a crime.
• The physical assault and use of excessive force against Walker on multiple occasions.
• The seizure of Walker’s personal property and religious items without due process or probable cause.
• The initiation and implementation of retaliatory adverse employment actions without due process.
• The deliberate fabrication and coordination of exaggerated, misleading, and hyperbolic police reports to manufacture a false narrative of criminality, which was then used to support search warrants targeting Walker’s private electronic communications and stored data.

“Public universities do not get to celebrate free speech when it is convenient and then unleash police, private surveillance contractors, trespass bans, criminal charges, and employment blacklists when students advocate for Palestinian human rights,” Amy V. Doukoure, the lead staff attorney at the Council on American-Islamic Relations Michigan chapter, said in a statement.

“Public universities are bound by the First and Fourteenth Amendments, not by political pressure or viewpoint preference,” Doukoure continued. “When a public university uses state power and private security operatives to surveil, punish, and intimidate a Black Muslim student because of his protected speech, that is not campus safety. That is unconstitutional retaliation.”