The president of George Washington University says the District of Columbia’s metropolitan police are refusing to clear the “illegal and potentially dangerous” encampment on the campus green. The mayor of the nation’s capital, Muriel Bowser, has been invited to testify before Congress about her refusal to clear the protest. 

University students set up an encampment on GW’s campus green on April 25, just over a week after the encampment at Columbia University sprang up. Students have for more than a week flown the Palestinian flag, pitched dozens of tents across the lawn, and vandalized the statue of President Washington at the heart of the university. 

“What is currently happening at GW is not a peaceful protest protected by the First Amendment or our university’s policies. The demonstration, like many around the country, has grown into what can only be classified as an illegal and potentially dangerous occupation of GW property,” the university president, Ellen Granberg, said in a letter to the GW community on Sunday. 

According to the Washington Post, the university administration asked metropolitan police to clear the protest from the yard on the same day it was set up, though that request was denied by police. 

In her Sunday letter, Ms. Granberg says the DC police are still refusing to clear the protest at her request, though she is in contact with them and they have stationed officers near the encampment.  “We continue to ask for the full support of our partners, including the District of Columbia,” she said.

Ms. Granberg says while she is personally “grief-stricken” by the situation at Gaza, there can be no tolerance for illegal protesting on the university’s campus. 

“When protesters overrun barriers established to protect the community, vandalize a university statue and flag, surround and intimidate GW students with antisemitic images and hateful rhetoric, chase people out of a public yard based on their perceived beliefs, and ignore, degrade, and push GW Police Officers and university maintenance staff, the protest ceases to be peaceful or productive,” Ms. Granberg wrote. 

“All of these things have happened at GW in the last five days,” she continued. 

The university president also says that outside agitators have taken over the protest with the help of students, which puts the GW community at risk. The demonstration has “been co-opted by individuals who are largely unaffiliated with our community and do not have our community’s best interest in mind,” she says. “It is increasingly unsafe and a violation of university and city regulations to have so many unidentified and unvetted people from outside the GW community living on university property.”

One university student told the student newspaper, the GW Hatchet, that the encampment will end once GW divests from Israel. “We buy into this university, we pay money into this university and we’re asking that the university take honest true stance in acknowledging their role in the ongoing genocide,” GW junior Mahmoud Beydoun told the outlet.

The DC mayor has been invited to appear before Congress on Wednesday by the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Congressman James Comer. Ms. Bowser and the chief of the metropolitan police, Pamela Smith, have not announced if they will appear before the panel. 

Ms. Smith told the Hill that she has seen no behavior at the protest that warrants sending in police. “I think here in the District of Columbia, we allow people the opportunity to have freedom of speech, and that’s what we’re seeing right now. There has been no violence, no violent behavior, no confrontations,” she said.