ACLU of Michigan’s Ramis Wadood on Its Lawsuit Against University of Michigan

Published: March 10.

A coalition of pro-Palestinian University of Michigan students and supporters protest in the street to pressure the University of Michigan Regents to divest the endowment from companies that could profit from the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Dearborn, Michigan, May 18, 2024. (Reuters/Rebecca Cook)

By Susanna Granieri

In February, ACLU of Michigan filed a federal lawsuit against the University of Michigan for its alleged violation of a group of protesters’ First Amendment rights after the university issued “trespass bans” that the protesters claim are an act of “unconstitutional restraint on speech” and a violation of their due process rights.

The lawsuit, which was also filed alongside the Sugar Law Center for Economic & Social Justice, claims the university’s implementation of the bans and its overall reaction to campus demonstrations is “heavy-handed,” “harsh” and “escalating.”

“The University’s use of trespass bans seems to be disproportionately targeted at these particular protestors, whose speech the University dislikes,” the lawsuit states, referencing protesters involved in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. “Despite a long history of protest activity regarding countless issues at the University of Michigan, which has sometimes included acts of civil disobedience, it appears that no other group of protestors have been subjected to similarly broad trespass bans for the same or similar alleged activity.”

Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, 2023, colleges and universities across the country have been embroiled in conflict, with demonstrations from pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups bringing tensions on campus to new heights. More than 3,500 people have been arrested on college and university campuses since April 2024.

All of the plaintiffs, according to the lawsuit, attended demonstrations and gatherings in support of Palestine or university divestment. Each plaintiff, between May and October 2024, was issued a trespass ban. Three were issued “full-campus trespass bans” as applied to the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus, while two were additionally banned from its Flint and Dearborn campuses.

The University of Michigan’s deadline to file a response to the ACLU’s lawsuit is March 12. In response to an email from First Amendment Watch requesting an official statement from the university on the lawsuit, director of the university’s public affairs office, Kay Jarvis, said “The university does not comment on litigation.”

The lawsuit also claims that the two policies being enforced by university officials are “vague” and “overbroad.” According to the lawsuit, the five plaintiffs — composed of both students and non-students — “wish to return to their daily lives and to the time-honored tradition of passionate on-campus political activism—a tradition with which Defendants [the university] are unduly interfering.”

Photo courtesy of Ramis Wadood.

First Amendment Watch spoke with Ramis Wadood, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Michigan, about the case. Wadood described the university’s alleged First Amendment violations, explained how the university’s policies sweep up constitutionally protected speech, and expressed concern that the plaintiffs represented in the suit are still unclear as to what specific action got them banned from campus.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

FAW: How would you summarize this lawsuit? What are the major First Amendment concerns?

Wadood: Over the last 16 months, the University of Michigan, like university campuses all across the country, have been a very active site for pro-Palestine protests that are largely led by students. Like most other colleges in the country, the University of Michigan’s response to those protests has been increasingly harsh. They’ve arrested students, disciplined many. They’ve suspended student groups. One of the tactics they’ve used is banishing protesters from the entire university campus, in some cases from all three of the university campuses in Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint. So our lawsuit is brought on behalf of five of those protesters who have been banned from the entire university campus. Now this is a First Amendment issue, particularly because this is a public university that has historically been the site of protest, and by banishing these folks from campus, we’re effectively cutting off their ability to return to campus and continue protesting.

FAW: What sparked the filing of this lawsuit? Are the five plaintiffs the only ones who were issued trespass bans?

Wadood: We don’t have an exact number, but we know that our five plaintiffs are only a small sample of the protesters who have been issued these trespass bans by the university. Early on in these protests, if you go all the way back to around November of 2023 the issuance of these trespass bans against protesters was fairly limited. You saw, for example, protesters protesting in front of a specific university building and then being banned from returning to that specific building for a year. Over time, we saw the use of trespass bans expand, so that it’s not targeted at any particular building, any particular location. Even if you protested at one specific spot, you started to get banned from more than just that spot. Once we’re getting into the spring of 2024, you’re seeing students who have protested on the university’s central campus green, they call it the Diag, all of a sudden get banned from the entire municipal block that includes not only the Diag, but multiple academic buildings and institutions. As we’re getting into the more recent months, then you start to see protesters getting banned from the entire campus altogether. Nothing about their conduct, nothing about the nature of the protests has changed. It’s just that the university’s response has gotten increasingly harsh. Once we started to hear about students and non-students being banned from the entire university campus, that’s when we talked to these folks and decided to file a lawsuit.

FAW: Where are the lines drawn for what is and is not permitted as a student protesting on a public university campus? Do non-students have different rights on a public campus like the University of Michigan?

Wadood: The University of Michigan is a public university, and as a public institution, as an arm of the government, it has additional obligations under the Constitution to protect the rights of its students and of local residents. When it comes to the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment, we see those obligations as you would in the same way we see them for any other government institution. Now, the University of Michigan campus, it’s a public campus, and emphasizing the public nature of campus is the fact that it is so deeply integrated into the larger Ann Arbor municipal grid. Anyone who’s been to Ann Arbor knows that the University of Michigan campus and the city of Ann Arbor are effectively one in the same, where you really can’t even go about your daily life without weaving in and out of campus. The campus and city are so deeply integrated that when we’re talking about public property, First Amendment rights, due process rights, and government obligations, this is kind of a quintessential locale for protests and for going about your daily life. We see those constitutional obligations on the university applying with full force on campus. It’s much more similar to NYU than it is to Columbia. There’s no gates at the University of Michigan. There’s no kind of walls or fences that block off campus or the university. It really is seamlessly woven into the larger fabric of Ann Arbor.

FAW: Were any of the plaintiffs banned from campus explicitly for speech that is not protected by the First Amendment or for their general involvement in protests?

Wadood: This is part of the problem. None of our plaintiffs know exactly why they were banned from, essentially, their local community. Each of our plaintiffs have participated in a different protest in various parts of campus, and they were never told – on the spot or after the fact once they tried to appeal these bans — exactly why they were banned from campus. I’ll give you an example of one of our plaintiffs. His name is Jonathan. He’s a student in the engineering school. He attended a protest in October 2024. The protest proceeded like any other protest would. A march throughout the public areas of campus, people chanting, megaphones, banners, posters. Jonathan participated in this protest for 45 minutes without issue, as it was circling around the Diag and around parts of campus. Forty-five minutes into it, he was approached by a police officer who told him he couldn’t use a megaphone. And Jonathan proceeded on his way. Later on, he continued to use the megaphone after having stopped at the police officer’s request, and was suddenly tackled, arrested, taken down to the station and given a full campus trespass ban. He doesn’t know if it’s in relation to this megaphone issue. He doesn’t know if it’s in relation to something he said. Despite asking in multiple appeal hearings, he has not yet been told exactly why he has been banned from campus. And another example, just to emphasize how truly in the dark our plaintiffs are, another one of our plaintiffs, Christian Grant, who is a local resident, attended a protest in September on campus. The protest, again, went off as any other protest would. No issues, not even any confrontation with the police. He left the protest without issue. After the protest ended, got in his car, drove away, and later, after he had left the protest, a police car pulled him over for allegedly running a red light. While he was pulled over, the police issued him a full campus trespass ban. He had already left the protest. The protest had already ended, and so to this day, again, he is in the dark as to why exactly, or what exactly, triggered his trespass ban.

FAW: Is there a certain university policy that’s allowing these bans to proceed? Was it expanded, implemented or proposed as a result of the ongoing campus protests nationwide?

Wadood: So there’s two policies at play here. One is an existing trespass policy that’s existed for many years. It essentially is a policy that codifies the university’s ability to ban people from its property. Just as any private property owner can ban someone from their property. The difference is that this is not a private business owner or private homeowner. This is a public university. They’re doing this under the guise of the trespass policy that they have had in place for many years. The problem is that they’re seriously abusing their ability to ban people from campus. One of the ways they’ve done that is by adopting, very quietly, a new policy over the summer of 2024 that, on its face, seems to be a boring policy about facilities. But if you look more closely at it, the facilities it’s trying to regulate are the entire university campus. Outdoor property, indoor property, buildings, fixtures and all that. And it essentially says people aren’t allowed to disrupt university operations on university facilities. It doesn’t define what “disruption” is. It doesn’t give any examples. It doesn’t have any limiting language that a protest could be seen as disruptive even though it’s protected speech. Even walking around campus with a controversial shirt or a banner or a poster, handing out flyers on the side of the sidewalk, those could be seen as disruptive by someone, but no one has any clue what disruption means and whether it covers a good amount of protective speech. And yet this “disruption” could be grounds for getting banned from campus. So what the issue really is is that the university has had the ability to ban people for a while, but over the last year and a half or so, they’ve really been abusing that authority by going after protesters and preventing them from coming back to campus to continue protesting.

College students protest on University of Michigan campus

A coalition of University of Michigan students camp at an encampment in the Diag to pressure the university to divest its endowment from companies that support Israel or could profit from the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas on the University of Michigan college campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 25, 2024. (Reuters/Rebecca Cook)

FAW: Would you describe these policies as vague or overbroad?

Wadood: Definitely. By not defining disruption, they are vague and overbroad. Overbroad in that they likely cover a good amount of protected speech. Again, protests that contain protected speech could be seen as disruptive by someone who disagrees with the content of the protest, or by the university if the university disagrees with the protest. So it’s certainly overbroad in that it likely covers a good amount of First Amendment protected speech. And it’s certainly vague because, having read the policy, no one is clear as to what is and isn’t subject to discipline, what is and isn’t a disruption.

FAW: The university also suspended “Students Allied for Freedom and Equality” for the next two years. How has this group been involved in pro-Palestinian protests on campus? Does this action by the university have any impact on its policy-making decisions that have affected the plaintiffs in the lawsuit?

Wadood: I will say that the university’s attacks on “SAFE,” that student group, and related suspensions and disciplinary actions, is actually the subject of a separate lawsuit that is brought by our co-counsel, the Sugar Law Center and other legal organizations and firms. So there’s a separate lawsuit ongoing in the same court about those issues. It’s certainly connected and concerning in that the university seems to be taking something called a “spaghetti prosecution” approach to student protesters, is really throwing the book at these student protesters and seeing what sticks. At any given point, a student protester could be subject to various forms of academic and Code of Conduct discipline. As an individual, the University Police Department could be pushing for criminal charges against that student protester. They could also be banned from campus through this trespass regime. If they’re a member or a leader of SAFE, then they’re also dealing with a whole separate suspension proceeding against SAFE. They might be facing employment retaliation or employment consequences from the university. It seems like the university is doing everything it can to respond aggressively to these protests, and the suspension of SAFE is one of those tactics.