Pro-Palestinian protesters arrested at Chuck Schumer’s office in New York City
Dozens of Pro-Palestine protesters gathered at US senator Chuck Schumer’s New York City office on Friday, leading to mass arrests as elected officials joined activists from Jewish Voice for Peace outside the Midtown office.
Tiffany Caban, a New York City council member, and Claire Valdez, a state representative, were among those arrested. Demonstrators were seen banging together pots and pans, a form of noise protest.
The protest at Schumer’s office was one of several such demonstrations that took place in major US cities Friday.
“We are calling on them to let aid in, to stop the bombing and allow aid into the Palestinian people of Gaza right now,” Jay Saper, a Jewish Voice for Peace spokesperson, told the New York Post. “This starvation crisis in Gaza is at a tipping point, and so we have to raise our voices.”
Elsewhere in New York City, there was a demonstration outside the Egyptian Consulate aimed at highlighting Egypt’s role in Gaza’s border policy. At least five people were reportedly detained after activists chained themselves to New York City’s Egyptian Mission to the United Nations.
According to a post by Palestinian Assembly for Liberation, who organized the demonstration, the protest’s goal was to “demand the government of Egypt cease its collaboration” with Israel – which it accused of being a “genocidal Zionist regime” and “put an end to the manufactured famine of Palestinians in Gaza”.
In Los Angeles, activists were holding another pots and pans protest. “Families face famine and children are dying of malnutrition,” the group Koreatown for Palestine wrote on social media. “We will make the people of Koreatown hear the sound of starvation in Gaza.”
Several other protests were planned for Friday evening in major US cities, including Arlington, Texas; Newark, New Jersey; Houston, Texas; Boise, Idaho; Portland, Oregon; West Hartford, Connecticut; Baltimore, Maryland, and San Jose, California.
On Thursday, protesters targeted the New York Times headquarters in Manhattan, writing the words “NYT lies, Gaza dies” in bold white lettering on the side of the building. There was also red paint smeared over the Times logo.
Some in US cities have continually held organized protests voicing support for a ceasefire in Gaza nearly two years into the military campaign that Israel launched there in response to Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack.
Some cities have hosted weekly Palestine vigils since late 2023. In some locations, organizers are also using these gatherings to provide legal support for protesters facing arrest or disciplinary actions on campuses.
The campus-based movement in support of Gaza, once centered around encampments in spring 2024, has led to a year-long legal back-and-forth between Donald Trump’s administration and several institutions, which began with the president accusing the schools of allowing antisemitism to go unchecked on campuses amid protests of Israel’s military strikes in Gaza.
At Columbia University, school officials have disciplined more than 80 students for their involvement in protests, including expulsions, suspensions and revoked degrees. Columbia recently announced a deal with the Trump administration to pay more than $220m to release funding, which Trump froze because of what he described as the university’s failure to squelch antisemitism.
In protest of the university’s compliance with the Trump administration, historian Rashid Khalidi has canceled his fall 2025 lecture course, saying in a letter published by the Guardian that the deal “constitutes the antithesis of academic freedom”.