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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