UC Santa Cruz Campus Bans for Protesters Are ‘Fundamentally Unfair,’ Lawyers Say

Lawyers representing pro-Palestinian protesters at UC Santa Cruz who were temporarily banned from campus last spring are asking a judge to halt the practice, calling it illegal and “fundamentally unfair.”

The case seeks a court order declaring that the university cannot ban students without a hearing — except in situations where they find that the person’s presence poses a significant threat. In a motion filed Thursday night, lawyers asked the court to issue a preliminary injunction, preventing the school from doing so while the case works its way through the legal system.

Chessie Thacher, a senior attorney with the ACLU of Northern California, said the legal team felt it was important to stop the practice “as soon as possible” as students return to campus this week, expecting that there could be more protest activity.

“We are concerned that the school, if it thinks that it can use this section of penal code — 626.4 — indiscriminately, broadly, and just sort of gather everyone who’s in a spot protesting and ban them all instantly on the spot without due process, that’s a really big problem. And a lot of people will suffer,” she told KQED.

Section 626.4 of the California Penal Code allows university officials to revoke consent for a person to be on campus for up to 14 days “whenever there is reasonable cause to believe that such person has willfully disrupted the orderly operation of such campus or facility.” Entering the campus while the ban is in place is a misdemeanor punishable by jail time or a fine.

Last May, 112 protesters were arrested after police in riot gear were deployed to a pro-Palestinian encampment set up in a little-used parking lot near the base of UC Santa Cruz’s mountainous campus. Some of those arrested had their permission to be on campus withdrawn under Section 626.4 and were left unable to access housing, campus resources or ways to complete their final exams and assignments, attorneys said.

Thacher and a legal team representing two students and one professor who were arrested sued the university this month for what they said were illegal campus bans.

The protesters’ lawyers argue that California’s Supreme Court has previously limited the scope of the legal code so that such bans can only be imposed without a hearing if a person’s presence on campus constitutes a “substantial and material threat of significant injury to persons or property,” and the students should have had due process.

“They didn’t present any such threat,” Rachel Lederman, another member of the legal team, told KQED earlier this month. “There was no violence or disruption caused by this protest. The only disruption was caused by these bans that instantly banished students from campus.”

Some students did have hearings, but those did not begin to take place until at least a week after the bans were issued, she said.

Representatives for UC Santa Cruz did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

On the day of the protest, Lederman said, many students and staff had come to stand in solidarity after they found out that police were arriving, and throughout the night, police surrounded and squeezed in on demonstrators before making the eventual arrests.

Among those arrested was professor Christine Hong, who said she joined around 11 p.m.

“In the past, faculty have served as a buffer between students and the police at different protests. We’ve also been there to witness what has happened, and I also went because I also was joining in the protest,” Hong, who directs the campus Center for Racial Justice, said earlier this month.

She received a campus ban and was unable to access her office and personal library or record asynchronous lecture videos she needed to prepare for an upcoming summer course.

Students Elio Ellutzi and Laaila Irshad are also joining the suit over their bans. Both reported in declarations filed with the court that they lost access to housing when they were barred from campus.

Irshad worked as a resident adviser, for which she was compensated with free housing and access to meal points.

“She didn’t really have a way to get food. She doesn’t receive parental support; she depends on the meal points that she receives in compensation for her R.A. job,” Lederman said. “She also couldn’t do her R.A. job, even though residents were still contacting her for help.”

Students reportedly lost access to their belongings, missed exams and failed courses while they could not go on campus — which aligned with the last two weeks of spring quarter. Hong said it was up to individual instructors to decide whether to offer students a remote option for their final exams.

The hearing for a preliminary injunction has been set for Nov. 19, Thacher said.