Police began clearing out the protester encampment at Yale University on Monday morning, the Yale Daily News reported, as tensions mount between protesters and leaders concerned about growing antisemitism on college campuses, which had prompted the White House to condemn “calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students.”

Both the Columbia and Yale protests were organized to call on their respective universities to divest from arms manufacturers that provide weapons to the Israeli military and other companies tied to the state. Columbia College Student Council previously approved a measure asking the university to divest from “companies and academic institutions that profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s acts of occupation, apartheid, and genocide,” the Columbia Spectator reported, but the student government tabled the motion after pushback from administrators. Last week, Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility approved a resolution to divest from companies that sell assault weapons to the public, but declined to divest from military arms manufacturers, rebuking protesters. “Military weapons manufacturing for authorized sales did not meet the threshold of grave social injury, a prerequisite for divestment, because this manufacturing supports socially necessary uses, such as law enforcement and national security,” the university said in a statement.

Monday’s arrests come as leaders and some Jewish organizations sound the alarm about antisemitic chants and violence as part of the protests—which organizers say are mostly peaceful. Over the weekend, Rabbi Elie Buechler, the director of Columbia’s Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus, an orthodox Jewish life organization, encouraged students to leave the Morningside Heights campus immediately. “It deeply pains me to say that I would strongly recommend you return home as soon as possible and remain home until the reality in and around campus has dramatically improved,” Buechler wrote in an email. However, Columbia’s chapter of Hillel International, the largest Jewish campus organization in the world, said that they do not believe Jewish students need to leave campus. In a statement posted on Sunday, the chapter called on the university to “act immediately in restoring calm to campus” and asked New York City to help protect students walking on Broadway and Amsterdam, the two avenues immediately outside campus. The White House eventually weighed in on the situation on Sunday. “While every American has the right to peaceful protest, calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students and the Jewish community are blatantly Antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous,” White House Press Secretary Andrew Bates said. On Monday, Columbia President Nemat Shafik canceled in-person classes to “deescalate the rancor and give us all a chance to consider next steps.”

“Silence is complicity,” President Biden said in a statement on Sunday, as part of his message for Passover, which begins on Monday night. “Even in recent days, we’ve seen harassment and calls for violence against Jews. This blatant Antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous – and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country.”