UC Santa Cruz Police Search of Student Protester’s Phone Raises Concern of Retaliation

Attorneys for a student who is suing UC Santa Cruz over a temporary campus ban she received after last spring’s pro-Palestinian protests are accusing university police of targeting her with a retaliatory, overly broad search in an apparent effort to stifle her speech.

Laaila Irshad is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed last month on behalf of two students and a professor who were temporarily barred from UCSC’s campus, saying their suspensions were illegal and caused great harm during the last two weeks of the spring academic session.

Less than a week after instruction began this fall, attorneys said, Irshad had her phone seized by university police.

After a fire alarm went off early on Oct. 1, she was standing outside the dormitory where she serves as the resident advisor when police approached with a search warrant for her phone, according to Chessie Thacher, an ACLU of Northern California attorney representing Irshad.

The warrant was issued based on a sealed affidavit that allegedly outlines probable cause to believe the phone’s contents include evidence of a felony.

While the affidavit is sealed, Thacher said her team has reason to believe the warrant is unrelated to the protest that led to Irshad’s arrest and the separate but related civil rights lawsuit.

“The kicker for us was that this search warrant, served in such a public way, had a picture of Laila on it, and it wasn’t a picture of her student ID — it was a picture of her giving an interview to a news reporter about her involvement in the case,” Thacher told KQED. “This just feels like it has a retaliatory motive or intent, or an attempt to kind of say to Ms. Irshad: ‘Proceed with caution because we are intent on silencing your speech.’”

Attorneys filed a motion on Friday declaring that Irshad plans to petition the court to destroy or void the warrant, return her phone, order the destruction of all seized information and unseal the affidavit at a hearing in December. If the warrant isn’t voided, she is requesting that the court seal her phone until there can be a hearing about her claim that the warrant is overly broad and the phone contained communication that falls under attorney-client privilege.

Scott Hernandez Jason, a spokesperson for UC Santa Cruz, said in an email that the warrant was related to an “active investigation that began prior to the lawsuit” and could not share any additional information.

Last May, Irshad was among 112 protesters who were arrested after police in riot gear were deployed to a pro-Palestinian encampment in a little-used parking lot near the base of UC Santa Cruz’s hilly campus. Rachel Lederman, another of the protesters’ attorneys, told KQED in September that throughout the night, officers squeezed in on the protesters and eventually detained many of them.

Irshad and others who were detained received temporary campus bans under Section 626.4 of the California Penal Code, which 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.

Irshad, fellow student Elio Ellutzi and professor Christine Hong joined a lawsuit over their bans in September, accusing UC Santa Cruz of illegally applying Section 626.4. The bans were issued without a hearing, which is unlawful unless the person’s presence on campus constitutes a “substantial and material threat of significant injury to persons or property,” according to the lawsuit.

Although some students had hearings, they did not begin to take place until at least a week after the bans were issued, Lederman said in September.

The protesters are asking the court for an injunction to prevent UC Santa Cruz from issuing these bans and a declaration that doing so is illegal, as well as a preliminary injunction that would halt the university’s use of the tactic until the case is ultimately decided.

Irshad, who was a resident advisor last year as well, said she was compensated for her RA work with free campus housing and meal points — both of which she lost access to when she was barred from campus. She also said she could not access her computer, complete assignments or attend class, ultimately leading her to fail courses, according to a declaration filed in Santa Cruz Superior Court.

The search warrant for her phone was issued on Sept. 25, about two and a half weeks after her lawsuit was filed and five days after filing for the preliminary injunction. Thacher said the “series of events” is troubling to the attorneys.

She also believes that the warrant itself — which gives officers access to all data on Irshad’s phone since it first stored data — is overly broad because it does not define a time period and searches her entire digital history.

“If Ms. Irschad was not a plaintiff in a civil rights lawsuit against the UC Santa Cruz Police Department and others, this warrant would still be overbroad,” Thacher said. “But she is a plaintiff in a civil rights lawsuit against [UCSC], and the events here … are really troubling. It feels retaliatory. And we’re asking the court to help us understand what is going on here so that we can protect and defend Ms. Irschad’s rights to be a plaintiff in this lawsuit.”

Currently, the motion for a preliminary injunction in Irshad’s civil rights suit is slated for a hearing in November, and a hearing to decide whether to void or tighten the restrictions around her search warrant is set for Dec. 19.