Contact: tahrircoalition@proton.me
MAY 5TH, 2025, ANN ARBOR, MI - Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has dropped felony and misdemeanor charges against 7 pro-Palestine activists from the University of Michigan Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Today, after eight months of pre-trial hearings, Judge Cedric Simpson was set to rule on a motion to recuse AG Nessel from the case for her alleged anti-Palestinian, -Muslim, and -Arab bias. Instead, the AG's office filed a motion to dismiss all felony and misdemeanor charges from 7 pro-Palestine protestors as a result of months of sustained pressure and advocacy by TAHRIR Coalition members and community allies. This development comes two weeks after AG Nessel sent the FBI, Michigan State Police, and local law enforcement to violently raid the homes of various pro-Palestine activists for alleged "multi-jurisdictional vandalism." The search warrants issued for the raids cited no probable cause and no charges have been announced. While the charges against the 7 protestors facing felonies have been dropped, 4 defendants from the U-M Encampment are still facing charge sat the misdemeanor level and 3 protestors are still being charged at both the felony and misdemeanor level for a "die-in" demonstration on U-M's campus last fall. From the charges to the FBI raids, this unprecedented repression of activists is a baseless attempt to undermine the movement for a free Palestine and to silence free speech.
AG Nessel's involvement in these cases has been scrutinized since September, when her office announced felony and misdemeanor charges against 11 pro-Palestine protesters after a violent raid on the U-M Encampment last May. Bypassing the local prosecutor, the AG pursued these politically motivated charges, all local to Washtenaw County, as a direct result of her close personal and financial ties with the U-M Board of Regents. As reported in the Guardian, U-M Regent Sam Bernstein co-chaired Nessel's AG campaign and six of the eight U-M Regents have donated a combined $33,000 to her campaigns. Democratic Regent Jordan Acker—a vocal Zionist who recently visited israel on U-M funds and has repeatedly smeared pro-Palestinian protesters—is also a close friend of the AG. Nessel herself has publicly denounced the pro-Palestine movement, mounting an aggressive media campaign against Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian lawmaker in Congress. Nessel regularly speaks at events sponsored by zionist organizations such as Hillel, Temple israel, and the Jewish Federation of Ann Arbor. While the AG's office has labelled allegations of anti-Arab and -Muslim bias as "baseless and absurd," Nessel was recently forced to recuse herself from a separate case in Hamtramck due to "perceived" bias against Arabs annd Muslims. Nessel has repeatedly abused the power of her office in order to prosecute her political enemies.
The TAHRIR coalition has been fighting for U-M to divest its endowment from the ongoing genocide in Gaza, of which over $6 billion is complicit in the israeli occupation of Palestine. U-M Regents have repeatedly rejected these demands, without ever meeting with pro-Palestine activists. "Nessel’s decision to drop the charges marks the happy end of a small chapter in the struggle for Palestinian liberation," said Oliver Kozler of the Encampment 11 in a statement after the hearing. "As Nessel scrambles to save face in the wake of legal defeat, the people know better: this is a profound political defeat for both Nessel and American zionism. We won today, but our fight is not over: so long as the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine persists, so too shall we."