Regents at UNM hear about more injuries by police during April 30 protest

A person records New Mexico State Police shove protesters that set up with tents inside the University of New Mexico Student Union Building on April 30, 2024. (Photo by Shaun Griswold / Source NM)

More details are emerging about injuries suffered by protesters at the hands of police during a protest at the University of New Mexico Student Union Building on April 30.

On Thursday at the UNM Board of Regents meeting, UNM College Democrats President Rakin Faruk recalled a meeting with university President Garnett Stokes two days earlier where, with tears in her eyes, she told her about how “we have had comrades brutalized to the point of not being able to walk.”

At the regents meeting, Faruk said in the SUB on April 30, police broke the ribs of one protester, and left some with concussions “in which my friends are forgetting our names.”

Public comment is set up so that there isn’t an exchange between the regents and the person speaking. And no regent responded in any way to what was said about the protests during public comment.

In their public explanation for why they sent the police into the SUB, UNM administrators said the takeover of the building was “not acceptable,” and that protesters “were not peacefully protesting, they were engaged in criminal activity.”

“The vandalism of the building, a precious gathering place on our campus, is not acceptable,” they said. “Barricading its doors and blocking its stairs are not acceptable. Intimidating students who are simply trying to study and learn, is not acceptable.”

Aye Sundram, a licensed clinical social worker, previously said she and other mental health professionals who treated protesters observed bruising and heard one say their wrists felt numb from the zip ties.

The arrests mentally shook the protesters Sundram treated. Experiences like these can trigger past traumatic memories and make it even harder to cope, she said.

Ahmad Assed, a civil rights and criminal defense attorney who has volunteered to represent the protesters charged after April 30, told New Mexico In Focus that the administration’s response at the SUB was “over the top.”

“There are opportunities for the university to foster some deescalation on their part,” Assed said. “There is a responsibility to ensure that we don’t go and call in State Police and have a forceful uprooting of students that occupy a student union building.”

The UNM Gaza Solidarity Encampment alleges on its social media page that police “violently removed” protesters from the SUB on April 30, injuring multiple people including a young person who is pregnant.

Video recorded by a community member and posted on the camp’s social media shows police inside the SUB throw a protester to the ground, their back hitting an upturned chair. The camp said the victim is a Jewish student at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

Another video from April 30 shows a police officer spraying a protester in the face with mace.

Source New Mexico was inside the SUB at the time and saw police shove multiple people to the ground before detaining them.

Police charge 16 protesters after forcing Gaza solidarity camp from UNM Student Union Building

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