Groups representing Columbia University professors on Tuesday sued the administration of US President Donald Trump over its effort to force the Manhattan university to tighten rules on campus protests and put a Middle Eastern studies department under outside oversight, among other measures.

Faculty groups also filed a separate lawsuit Tuesday seeking to block the Trump administration from deporting non-citizen anti-Israel campus activists, following the arrest earlier this month of Columbia graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States.

Meanwhile, nine US and Israeli citizens who were victims of the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023 — including relatives of people murdered or taken hostage, and two people affiliated with Columbia who reported mistreatment there — sued organizers of the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests on Monday, accusing them of serving as Hamas’s “propaganda arm” and having prior knowledge of the terror group’s shock assault. The defendants included Khalil.

All three lawsuits were filed in Manhattan federal court.

In one of the lawsuits on Tuesday, the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation accused the Trump administration of trying to force the university’s hand by canceling $400 million in federal funding and threatening to withhold billions more in the future.

The plaintiffs said the lawsuit “challenges the Trump administration’s unlawful and unprecedented effort to overpower a university’s academic autonomy and control the thought, association, scholarship, and expression of its faculty and students.”

“The Trump administration is coercing Columbia University to do its bidding and regulate speech and expression on campus by holding hostage billions of dollars in congressionally authorized federal funding – funding that is responsible for positioning the American university system as a global leader in scientific, medical, and technological research and is crucial to ensuring it remains so,” they said.

Columbia has been a focal point of anti-Israel activity since thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel on October 7, 2023, to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, triggering the ongoing........

© The Times of Israel