An anti-Israel protest at the University of Texas at Austin inspired by the Columbia University encampment was quickly crushed before it started by Texas State Troopers on horseback Wednesday — with three demonstrators arrested.
The university had warned the Palestine Solidarity Committee, which encouraged the students to protest on the campus, that the event was unauthorized and would not be allowed to “proceed as planned,” local KVUE reports.
Despite the warning, hundreds of students walked out of their class before noon to demonstrate at the school’s Gregory Plaza with attempts to occupy the lawn, only to be met by a phalanx of troopers and cops.
“I don’t think students were expecting this kind of a response,” Amelia Kimball, associate managing editor at student newspaper, The Daily Texan, told CNN.
Video from The Daily Texan shows the moment the officers arrived, marching in line and equipped with riot gear as several others approached on horseback.
Kimball said the protest lasted only minutes, with the crowd ordered to disperse as she noted “physical struggles between police and students.”
The Palestine Solidarity Committee had put out a call for “emergency action” on Tuesday calling on students to “reclaim our space” through the protest as a show of solidarity with the college demonstrations in New York and across the country.
“In the footsteps of our comrades at Columbia SJP, Rutgers-New Brunswick, Yale, and countless others across the nation, we will be establishing THE POPULAR UNIVERSITY FOR GAZA and demanding our administration divest from death,” the group wrote on Instagram.
The UT administration, however, told the group on Tuesday that the campus will not be occupied by the protesters.
Simply put, The University of Texas at Austin will not allow this campus to be ‘taken’ and protesters to derail our mission in ways that groups affiliated with your national organization have accomplished elsewhere,” officials wrote in a statement to the group.
“Any attempt to do so will subject your organization and its attending members to discipline including suspension under the Institutional Rules,” the college warned.
The Texas Department of Public Safety confirmed that at least three people were arrested in the protest, KVUE reports.
The swift police action in Texas comes as similar protests continue at Columbia University, where students are occupying the campus lawn to protest Israel’s war in Gaza.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbot had slammed the New York demonstrations on Monday for sowing the seeds of similar protests that have popped up across the nation’s colleges.
“Ivy League universities are showing that their time has passed,” Abbott wrote.
“They are little more than monuments of our past. Now they are accomplices of the chaos they helped to sow.”