Below is a roundup of the 2026’s top media coverage of stories of repression and resistance featuring Palestine Legal clients, attorneys, and attorney network members from outlets including The Guardian, The Hill, Inside Higher Ed, The Intercept, and Truthout.
Inside Higher Ed
The War on Student Speech | February 24
Palestine Legal has seen an explosion in requests for help related to speech issues. Last spring the organization said calls for legal support had increased by 600 percent since 2022. (Those numbers include requests from professors, as well as college and high school students.)
Palestine Legal attorney Radhika Sainath argued that while pro-Palestinian advocacy is increasingly being suppressed, such crackdowns are used to restrict speech on other issues.
“We’re feeling the effects beyond Palestine, beyond speech supporting Palestinian rights. We at Palestine Legal have been saying for years that Palestine is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to suppressing student speech, academic freedom or social justice movements,” Sainath said.
The Hill
String of legal wins offers hope to college protesters | March 9
While the wins offer hope to protesters, they also show how long and costly the battle can be.
Almost two dozen Columbia activists who took over Hamilton Hall in 2024 had received suspensions, expulsions or revocations of their degrees from the university.
Police charged them with misdemeanor trespassing, but the Manhattan district attorney’s office dismissed the charges, assuming the university would deal out punishments on its own.
But the dismissed charges meant the records were sealed, and the school had no evidence of individual offenses, choosing to punish the group as a whole, which a judge ruled illegal. Columbia has said it is looking at its options.
“A lot of schools have been, because they’re under pressure from the Trump administration, pursuing student conduct processes without necessarily having the right procedures or justifications for doing so,” s aid Zoha Khalili, senior managing attorney at Palestine Legal, adding “that initial part of the process” takes place completely “within the university administration.”
“They don’t have to have any kind of like neutral decisionmaker outside of the university play any kind of role. And so, universities, really under pressure from the Trump administration, have been going rogue and trying to secure harsh punishments against their own students in order to be able to testify in Congress about the fact that they punish people over these encampments or make deals with the Trump administration,” Khalili added.
The Guardian
Efforts to shut down pro-Palestinian speech face series of setbacks in court | March 19
Few debates from the last few years have been more contentious than whether criticism of Israel and Zionism is antisemitic, threatens Jewish people or violates their civil rights. Allegations of antisemitism have cost people jobs, provided pretexts for censorship and fueled an unprecedented crackdown on protest over Israel and shows of support for Palestinian rights, especially at universities.
Pro-Israel groups have filed undreds of lawsuits or legal actions in an effort to silence some of this speech, with the vast majority filed since 2023 in response to the protest movement surrounding Israel’s recent war in Gaza . The most important rulings to have come out of these cases, experts say, have found that speech and slogans at the heart of the controversies are protected by the first amendment.
A number of the rulings also state that the speech at issue is not antisemitic and does not violate the civil rights of Jewish students. Together, those decisions are delivering a blow to pro-Israel groups’ legal campaign to shut down protests and criticism of Israel through the courts.
“The courts have said, ‘We agree, this is first amendment protected speech,” said Radhika Sainath, an attorney with Palestine Legal, which filed briefs in many of the cases. That, she continued, has resulted in “wins for Palestinian rights because they are starting to create a body of law”.
The Guardian
Requests for US legal aid linked to Palestine activism far surpass pre-2023 levels | April 21
A civil rights group dedicated to the defense of pro-Palestinian speech said that requests for legal assistance linked to Palestine-related activism in the US continues to far surpass pre-2023 levels, having logged 300% more requests for support last year than in any year prior to Israel’s war in Gaza.
Palestine Legal logged some 1,131 requests in 2025. That was less than the record 2,184 requests it received in 2024, amid the peak of student protests and encampments, but well above its yearly average prior to the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks and Israel’s response in Gaza.
“With Trump’s return to power in January 2025, the authoritarian repression of the Palestine solidarity movement in the United States – already at unprecedented heights with the Biden administration’s crackdown on dissent against the US-backed genocide – went into overdrive,” the group wrote in a report published on Tuesday.
Most of the requests fielded by Palestine Legal in 2025 related to student activism, including 40 at K-12 institutions and 663 at universities. Most have to do with student suspensions and bans from campus over Palestine-related advocacy.
The group is representing, for example, three Harvard University students who are facing discipline for protesting against the campus appearance of the CEO of a fossil-fuel company, who is also a board member of the weapon manufacturer Lockheed Martin board. The students are the first to be investigated by a new disciplinary body – the University Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (UCRR) – which Harvard set up in response to demands from the Trump administration.
“We have said for a long time that Palestine is the canary in the coalmine,” said Tori Porell, an attorney representing the Harvard students. “But once these policies and systems are put in place, they can be used against anyone: climate protesters, those speaking against Trump, racial justice protesters.”
The Intercept
FBI Quietly Closed a Probe Into Mahmoud Khalil While He Was in ICE Detention | May 12
“Revelations that false reports were made against Mahmoud prior to his government sanctioned kidnapping, and that the administration continued to make false claims that Mahmoud posed a danger, even though the FBI found these claims to be unsubstantiated, are highly representative of this administration’s broader approach of acting first and making up justifications later, with no regard for truth or the findings of the administration’s own experts,” said Zoha Khalili, a senior managing attorney at Palestine Legal. “Around the world, people who demand freedom, equality, liberation, and the basic necessities of life for Palestinians have been smeared, silenced, investigated, and even imprisoned for their advocacy.”
The Guardian
‘We call it the P-word’: Chicago professor suspended after assignment mentions Palestinians | June 5
Rima Kapitan, her attorney, said in a letter to school officials that they don’t even have a clear “theory of discrimination”. She wrote that Talwar had “bent over backwards” to accommodate the student.
“Are SAIC faculty expected to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their course materials? Are Arab Muslims unworthy of their own case studies?” Kapitan wrote. “If a white supremacist student filed a discrimination complaint with the University alleging that he was triggered by a case study about a Black client who was struggling with police violence against Black people, would SAIC proceed with an investigation against the professor who drafted the assignment?”
Truthout
Latest Case of “Palestine Exception” to Free Speech Is “Golden Gate Defendants” | July 15
In spite of being found guilty of multiple misdemeanors, the Golden Gate Defendants view the outcome as a victory . Tori Porell, senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal , who has been supporting the defendants, said San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins “failed to secure convictions on the most serious charges” of felony conspiracy. Jury members were deadlocked on the felony charges that could have resulted in 15-year prison sentences.
Still, defendants and their allies have spent two years enmeshed in the stress of a long-drawn-out trial. Now, those charged and convicted await a sentencing hearing in August.
The decision to bring such a wide array of charges in relation to a protest action was unusual. Porell called it “a classic case of over-prosecution, meant to stifle dissent and scare people away from speaking out against the United States and Israeli-backed genocide of Palestinians.” During the trial, DA Jenkins even attempted to prevent Golden Gate Defendants and their supporters from wearing keffiyehs — a symbol of solidarity with Palestinians. “The judge, fortunately, knows the First Amendment and did not proceed with that request,” Porell said.
Sara Cantor, one of the defendants, was quoted in a press release as saying that the goal of the protest was “to show that the status quo cannot continue while our government funds genocide.”
Porell explained that Cantor and her fellow activists are using their serious predicament to continue raising awareness of the genocide. “These defendants have bravely showed up and centered Palestine throughout this trial, showing that even under this aggressive prosecution, they won’t be silenced, and they won’t be scared away from speaking up against a genocide.”
Although the actions of April 15, 2024, ought to have been considered protected speech under the First Amendment, DA Jenkins justified the harsh charges her office brought against the activists. She cited “the danger … to people who are on the bridge, who might be suffering medical emergencies, who might have significant things that they’re trying to get to.” Jenkins went on to suggest that in the event of an earthquake, people trapped on a bridge would have their lives endangered by such an act of civil disobedience.
What the DA did not say is that law enforcement had the ability to let traffic through but chose to let the bridge remain completely blocked. “The protesters had a plan to allow a lane of traffic for emergency vehicles to pass,” but it was the police “who did not open that channel,” Porell said. “The police also blocked the bridge traffic in the opposite direction, which the protesters did not do.”
Moreover, there were several comparable protests blocking traffic on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in the past, including an AIDS-related protest in 1989, and, more recently, a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. “ Those protesters were not treated anywhere near as harshly as these protesters who were speaking up for Palestine were treated,” said Porell. The only conclusion that can be drawn, according to Porell, is that the Golden Gate Defendants “were targeted because of the content of their speech and what they were speaking up about.”
Actions in support of Palestinians have long been anathema in the United States, a phenomenon Porell and others describe as “the Palestine exception to free speech.” She viewed the case of the Golden Gate Defendants as “just one of many examples we’ve seen in the last several years of attempts to chill speech around Palestine.”
Media Roundup: Top Stories of Repression and Resistance Featuring Palestine Legal Clients and Attorneys
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at PalestineLegal.