Why URBC started the Boycott Cornell campaign, supporting Amandla Thomas-Johnson and Momodou Taal
Question: Why is a UK-based migrant student campaign demanding that we boycott Cornell University, a US-based university?
Question: Won’t Amandla’s and Momodou’s joint fundraiser help them recoup their PhD funding loss?
We know the academic job market in the Global North is in tatters. Departmental closures, academic staff losing jobs, and the continued adjunctifcation of academic labour have made working in higher education precarious. But whatever we are facing as academics and students in the belly of imperial, genocidal violence doesn’t come close to the bombs that are still falling on university students and academic staff inside Gaza. Data from the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education has revealed that since 7 October, the genocide has claimed 1,386 university students’ lives. On 27 October, Israel bombed the Islamic University of Gaza, adding to the growing death toll of university students and academic staff.
Question: How can I support Amandla and Momodou?
Why the British media doesn’t want you to remember the Gilets Noirs Movement in France
As oppressed racialised youth in France rebel against state violence and austerity, the British media has focused on burning buildings or youth in black masks resisting police terror, to denigrate the protests as nothing more than a riot against law and order. At the same time, when the British media historicises the current protests in France, they refer back to 2018’s Gilet Jaunes, otherwise the Yellow-Vest Movement, against austerity.
For abolionists, conspicuously missing is a mention of the Gilet Noirs, or the Black-Vest Movement, and we explain why this is the case. But first, you need to understand the significance of the Gilet Noirs.
Inspired by the Gilet Jaunes, undocumented migrants in France, calling themselves Gilet Noirs, began to organise in 2019, demanding that their status be regularised after months, sometimes decades, without residency papers, and that they be allowed access to housing and jobs. Fueling the fire of the movement was the passing of the 2018 immigration and asylum bill, which shortens asylum application deadlines from 120 days to 90 days, doubled the time for which undocumented migrants can be detained, and introduced a one-year prison sentence for entering France illegally.
Human Rights Watch added, “Under the guise of providing a more effective asylum system, the bill includes a series of measures that would diminish access to protection.” By shorting the deadline to file an asylum application, Human Rights Watch expressed grave concern, saying, the “most vulnerable asylum seekers, who would be the ones most likely to miss the deadline,” thus becoming undocumented within the French immigration system.
For these reasons, the Gilet Noirs organised to fight the deeply colonial and xeno-racist immigration regime that was forcing many migrants into destitution, subjected to constant police and state violence, with no ability to regularise their status. The Gilet Noirs movement pointedly addressed the neocolonialism at the heart of the French carceral immigration system, stating, “France and its companies grow rich on our backs”. Their politics reminded of the French colonial presence in their respective homelands through businesses like Total and Suez, which steal resources from the Global South while propping up dictators who profit from French business extractivism.
In this way, the Gilet Noirs weren’t only demanding regularised status and residency papers, but calling attention to the colonial politics that dictate their dispossession, both in France and in their respective homelands in the Global South.
To get their message across, the Gilet Noirs organised occupations, the first being a sit-in at the Panthéon, chanting,“Black vests, Black vests. What do we want? Papers! Who for? For everyone!” A few months later, the Gilet Noirs occupied Terminal 2F at Paris’ Charles-de-Gaulle airport, protesting the role of France’s national carrier, Air France, in deportations. The Gilet Noirs said that the airport was, “first and foremost a border. A border without a wall or barbed wire.” The occupation of Charles-de-Gaulle airport by undocumented migrants was also a challenge to the increased deportation policy of the Macron government.
The significance of the Gilet Noirs is unacknowledged by the British media because it was a movement led by undocumented migrants demanding residency while challenging the very colonial structures that oppress their bodies in France and in their home countries. The prospect of an undocumented or pan-migrant movement in Britain rising to dismantle the carceral immigration regime built from the 1960s to the present, and demanding an honest reckoning with colonialism and imperialism, terrifies Britain. Under the Hostile Environment Policy, every citizen, including migrants themselves, is drafted as border cops by exercising border policing whether in the workplace, schools, universities, the NHS, and housing. What terrifies Britain is migrants organizing themselves and dealing blows against the system that keeps them exploited.
But migrant-solidarity NGOs that dot the UK landscape are also not invested in a migrant-led undocumented movement either. In the UK, migrant solidarity is still gatekept by British citizens, whether white or racialised, who lead NGOs that channel migrant rage through milquetoast actions, like appealing to the sympathies of politicians on either side of the Parliamentary aisle, who continue to pass ever more draconian immigration laws designed to placate fascists, who want us dead. The current migrant-solidarity landscape betrays the fact that UK migrants were leading their own movements against colonial policies both here and in their respective homelands. The Asian Youth Movement and the British Black Panthers are testaments to previous racialised, working-class, migrant-led organising that existed in the UK.
While the Gilet Noirs anchored their politics and praxis to anticolonialism, migrant-solidarity NGOs pay lip service to it in name only. Three years into the continued genocide in Gaza and the genocide happening in South Lebanon, along with the war against Iran and now Yemen, instead of joining the national demonstration for Palestine that took place in London on 10 October, they held a protest in Manchester outside of Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s office. Juxtapose the protests and occupations of the Gilet Noirs, intended to be disruptive to the French state, with the UK variety, protesting on a day when the office is closed and Burnham is not in attendance. Moreover, to organise a protest at the same time as the Palestine demonstration commemorating three years of genocide actively divorces migrant struggles from their anticolonial, anti-Zionist, and anti-genocide roots.
Gilet Noirs provides the very inspiration and political direction lacking in the UK’s liberal-bent migrant solidarity, where migrants are seen as always vulnerable, in need of protection, but never with the agency of their voice to make the kinds of connections to forge a struggle to eliminate repression.
Further reading on the Gilet Noirs
Butterly, L. (2019, August 8). Who are the gilets Noirs?. New Internationalist. https://newint.org/features/2019/07/23/who-are-gilets-noirs
Butterly , L. (2020, May 15). The Gilet noirs navigate the lockdown. Verso. https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/4712-the-gilet-noirs-navigate-the-lockdown
Clerget, T. (2019, July 15). Occupation du panthéon : ” Ils ont voulu terroriser des gens qui ont relevé la tête, et qui n’ont plus peur “. Basta! https://basta.media/Pantheon-gilets-noirs-occupation-sans-papiers-mal-loges-Republique-repression-violences-policieres
Tazzioli, M. (2020). What is left of migrants’ spaces? Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences, 1(1), 137–161. https://doi.org/10.1163/25903276-bja10001
They signed the #BoycottCornell Letter. You should too!
A growing number of academic staff, university students, organisations and members of the public are endorsing the Boycott Cornell: Stand with Palestine and Migrant Students letter.
Since the letter’s publication, endorsements have come from Harsha Walia, author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013) and Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (2021), Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity, European Palestine Network, in addition to academics, students and the general public.
One of the more powerful comments came from a Cornell University alumnus, Brittany Rosendaul, who decided to “master-out of” their PhD, stating, “The actions taken by the university in the past several years are just appalling.”
Indeed, the actions of Cornell University towards Amandla Thomas-Johnson and Momodou Taal, two pro-Palestine, migrant, Black, Muslim PhD students, who had their funding pulled for refusing to return to the United States. This comes after two years of sustained harassment by Cornell University because of their on-campus activism and work for Palestinian liberation.
Cornell University is fully aware that Amandla and Momodou, cannot enter the United States without incurring the full weight of US state violence for their activism in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. Instead of allowing Amandla and Momodou to continue their funding obligations outside the US, Cornell University is weaponising their precarity as migrant students reliant on university funding to survive as they continue their research.
Putting unreasonable conditions on their funding is just another example of how Cornell University is attempting to force Amandla and Momodou out of their PhD and the university.
As educators, students, activists, and the general public, it is our ethical and moral duty to show solidarity with Amandla and Momodou for bravely continuing to raise their heads above the pulpit as migrants in their refusal to cower before Cornell University’s deliberate harassment campaign against Palestinian liberation.
There are three ways to sign the Boycott Cornell letter:
1. University Staff and University Students: Sign as a university staff member (academic staff, library staff, and administrative staff) and as a university student (Bachelor’s, Masters, PhD)
2. General Public: Not in academia? Use this category to sign.
3. Campaigns, Organisations, Advocacy Groups, & Unions: Use this category to leave a campaign, organisation, advocacy group, or union endorsement.
Add your signature here.
View the signatory list for each group here:
1. University Staff and University Students.
2. General Public
3. Campaigns, Organisations, Advocacy Groups, & Unions
Signatures will be recorded every Tuesday and Thursday. Please remember that we are volunteers with full-time jobs that are updating this page. If we have recorded your name incorrectly, please email Unis Resist Border Controls (URBC) with a screenshot: unisresistbordercontrols [@] gmail [dot] com.
Boycott Cornell: Support Palestine, Support Migrant Students!
Cornell University has become a global news pariah, following its horrific negligence and lack of any meaningful accountability after 7 of its students took part in a gruesome sexual assault. While Cornell University is being rightfully questioned for its abhorrent handling of sexual violence on its campus, we must not forget how it has continued to target and harass two migrant pro-Palestine PhD researchers, Amandla Thomas-Johnson and Momodou Taal, who have lost their PhD funding for refusing to return to the United States. Cornell University has left them with no choice but to crowdfund the $25,000 each they need for the final leg of their research.
Cornell University is fully aware that Amandla and Momodou, cannot enter the United States without incurring the full weight of US state violence for their activism in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. Instead of allowing Amandla and Momodou to continue their funding obligations outside the US, Cornell University is weaponising their precarity as migrant students reliant on university funding to survive as they continue their research.
“If I don’t get funding, I’m going to be homeless,” Momodou has explicitly stated to The Intercept. At the same time, Amandla notes the psychological toll of this decision, commenting, “I go through day-to-day anxiety — how can I be expected to finish a Ph.D.
Cornell University is Complicit in Genocide & Border Oppression
Since 2025, Amandla and Momodou, who hold British citizenship, have been conducting their PhD research outside the United States. This is because they were forced to flee from the United States under the Trump Administration’s weaponisation of their student visas, or face U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention for their steadfast solidarity with Palestinian liberation as migrant Black Muslim students.
At the start of the current genocide in Gaza, Amandla and Momodou played an active role on the Cornell University campus in standing in solidarity with Palestine and against US imperialism. Both Amandla and Momodou participated in the September 2024 protest against the presence of weapons manufacturers Boeing and L3Harris at a Cornell University careers fair. Because of their participation, Cornell University suspended Amandla and Momodou, barred them from campus, and threatened them with expulsion.
President Trump’s second term saw his administration employ ICE to wage a vendetta against US cities that provided sanctuary to undocumented migrants, against migrant students and especially those with precarious immigration status, who showed solidarity with Palestinian liberation and against the continued US-Israel war in Iran. Currently, 400,000 migrants, including those with US citizenship and green card holders, have found themselves in ICE detention.
Under this repression, Momodou, along with another Cornell University PhD student, Sriram Parasurama, and Professor Mukoma Wa Ngugi, launched a legal challenge against the Trump administration’s executive order signed in January 2025, supposedly to combat antisemitism on college campuses. In reality, the intended purpose was to stifle and prevent Palestine solidarity activism and further erode anti-imperial free speech within US universities. An aspect of the executive order was intended to deport non-citizen students and foreign nationals involved in pro-Palestine solidarity, couched by the Trump administration as being “Hamas sympathisers” or participants in “pro-jihadist protests”, intended to criminalise Palestine solidarity & anti-imperialist movements. The legal challenge argued that the executive order violated First and Fifth Amendment rights by suppressing political advocacy and allowing government actions, such as visa revocations and deportation threats, without adequate due process. Unfortunately, the legal challenge was unsuccessful. Fearing for his safety and the possibility of being detained by ICE, and with no confidence in the US judicial system, Momodou left the United States, and Amandla soon followed. Both Amandla and Momodou are living in Egypt.
An investigation by The Intercept found that, leading up to Amandla’s departure from the United States, Google secretly gave ICE agents his Gmail account information and a federal subpoena to release banking and credit card information. The purpose was to help ICE track down and detain Amandla, who was hiding in safe houses from ICE before he left the United States.
In January 2026, Momodou, a British citizen, travelled to the UK and was detained under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 by three officers in civilian clothes and held for six hours, and answered questions about his childhood, friends, mosques, Islamic preachers, and whether he had ever read Karl Marx. As Momodou wrote about the experience of his UK detention for The Nation, “within minutes of landing at Heathrow, I found myself back inside [the US security state].”
Cornell University previously allowed Amandla and Momodou to continue with their PhD research and funding while abroad. However, in August 2026, Cornell University informed both Amandla and Momodou that if they do not return to the United States, their funding will end. Instead of showing support for Amandla and Momodou, Cornell University has consistently sided with the Trump administration in its targeting of pro-Palestine migrant students.
Boycott Cornell University and Show Solidarity with Palestine and Migrant Students
The institutionalised misogyny that is witnessed at Cornell University when it comes to sexual assault is also linked to Palestine, carceral borders and the dispossession of indigenous communities in the United States. Thousands of Palestinians, both men and women, are currently detained in Israeli prisons, sexually assaulted, tortured, and killed. Migrants inside immigration detention, whether in the US, UK, or EU, have been subjected to sexual violence, torture, and physical assault. We cannot forget that as a land-grant institution, Cornell University was established through the genocide of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫɁ (the Cayuga Nation). Universities like Cornell have long profited from the violence and genocide in Gaza, in addition to indigenous communities, and the ongoing violence unleashed upon migrants.
As educators, students, activists, and the general public, it is our ethical and moral duty to show solidarity with Amandla and Momodou for bravely continuing to raise their heads above the pulpit as migrants in their refusal to cower before Cornell University’s deliberate harassment campaign against Palestinian liberation.
Cornell University’s behaviour towards Amandla and Momodou is deeply shameful, particularly given they could have used their due discretion as an elite university to thwart the Trump administration’s criminalisation of migrant students who support Palestine. Instead, Cornell University towed the Trump administration’s pro-Zionist policy on migrant students involved in Palestine solidarity by using administrative violence by way of PhD funding to force Amandla and Momodou out of their studies and ultimately, out of Cornell University. It is especially egregiously bad, given Cornell University’s support of Black Lives Matter, that a university, with a population of 4,000 PhD students, would continue to mistreat two Black, Muslim PhD students, out of the paltry 310 Black PhD students currently enrolled, merely for exercising their solidarity with Palestine.
For these reasons, we call at this critical time for a complete boycott of Cornell University for its decision to rescind funding for Amandla and Momodou. We will maintain the boycott of Cornell University until it reverses its decision and reinstates Amandla’s and Momodou’s PhD funding.
We encourage academics, early career researchers, students (PhD, MA/MSc, and Bachelor’s), activist groups and collectives, and members of the general public to refrain from doing the following:
1. Taking up employment or student places at Cornell University.
2. Speaking and/or attending conferences, workshops, and talks, whether officially invited by a department, academic association, or student association at Cornell University. We implore student groups to hold their talks and events off Cornell University campus as a form of protest against the institution’s draconian curtailing of student activism for Palestinian liberation in addition to its horrific targeting of migrant students.
3. Collaboration with academic staff at Cornell University.
4. Publishing with Cornell University Press.
Only by isolating Cornell University can we send a robust message that any university that capitulates to Zionism, Trump’s fascism, and carceral violence and oppression of pro-Palestine migrant students is no longer a place of education but a cog in the growing fascism engulfing the United States.
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University Staff and University Student Signature Form
Organisation, Campaigns and Unions Signature Form
