By Iman Neja
On Thursday, Oct. 1, in front of the sleek grey stone entryway of The Hotel at The University of Maryland, students unfurled a white banner reading: “DISCLOSE, DIVEST, WE WILL NOT STOP, WE WILL NOT REST.”
Students from UMD’s Anti-Imperialist Movement (AIM), a coalition composed of politically aligned clubs including UMD’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and UMD’s Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (TerpCHRP), spoke against companies present at the hotel at the Career Fair hosted by this university, including Pax Silica, Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS), Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, L3Harris, and AeroVironment.
UMD’s AIM organizes every year to protest career fairs due to UMD’s close relationship with weapons manufacturing companies and concerns about the youth pipeline to working in companies implicated in human rights abuses. Al-Hikmah has reached out to UMD for comment and this story will be updated.
Rio G., a speaker from Anakbayan College Park, said that U.S. imperialists and foreign companies are occupying Filipino land, plundering its resources, and exploiting Filipino people. She described her own experience of having to be separated from her family due to this exploitation.
She said Pax Silica, in particular, “is displacing hundreds of farmers and indigenous Aeta people off of land they’ve tilled for generations to make way for widespread mining and AI manufacturing.”
According to Radio Free Asia, the Sapang Kawayan village, a village of approximately 200 Indigenous Aeta households, was told to relocate by the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA), a project mandated by U.S. project Pax Silica, due to the construction of a Pax Silica hub on the land where the village stood in fall 2026.
She urged the Filipino people to fight back.
“The Filipino people [deserve] the genuine freedom and sovereignty they’ve been fighting for for centuries, to have ownership of our land and our resources, to seek an end to family separation and forced migration,” she said.
Xavier Perry, a speaker from the UMD chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), spoke about the organization’s sanctuary campus campaign and the “imperial boomerang,” a term coined by Afro-Martinican author and politician Aimé Césaire which describes how the harsh treatment of native populations leads to fascism in the colonizing country.
Perry pointed out that a local mother, Mirna, was “recently detained by ICE and deported to El Salvador on September 29, separated from her son,” adding that ICE has been performing mass detentions and deportations in Silver Spring.
UMD SJP then spoke about the impact of recruiting students for weapons manufacturing companies on violence in Gaza and the West Bank.
According to the World Health Organization, only 19 of the 36 hospitals in Gaza are operational, and of those 19, only 12 can provide more than basic emergency care.
“Over 90% of the schools damaged are fully destroyed by Israeli bombardment,” Mohammad Abukhdeir, a speaker from SJP, said. “Officially, we have the names of 72,835 Palestinians killed, but those are only the ones whose bodies were taken to the hospital and officially declared dead.”
He criticized the university’s response to students’ demands that it cut ties with weapons manufacturers and companies profiting from human rights abuses:
“Last year, they [the university] spent $136,000 in one day just to have police presence at an SJP vigil on the two-year anniversary of the genocide, and we expect it next week for the three-year anniversary. These drastic measures are all part of the pattern we’ve seen across the country of universities prioritizing profits and wealthy donors’ interests over justice and the wills of the students they claim to serve.”
According to reporting by the Diamondback, UMD administration spent $136,389 on on-campus security, with 72% of that spending going towards the UMPD for demonstrations on Oct. 7, 2024.
One of these donors, Abukhdeir says, is Israel’s own Ministry of Defense.
Public records show that the University of Maryland was one of the schools that has had financial relationships with the Israeli Ministry of Defense or Israeli weapons manufacturers.
Other students spoke against human rights abuses and sexual violence, calling out the companies that enable them. They also called for the release of Christina Pasion, a Baltimore-based Filipino-American organizer who has been held by the Philippine Bureau of Immigration ever since she and another organizer, Binay Serrano, were arrested on July 30 by the Philippine National Police and the 68th Infantry Battalion.
“It is such a shame that a public institution like UMD, which claims to advance and disseminate knowledge to the betterment of society, willingly chooses time and time again to be the first cog in the imperial machine that’s murdered so many people from Palestine to Sudan to the Philippines to Congo and beyond,” said Abukhdeir.
“Shame on them,” he said, “the companies and the universities, for trying to desensitize us into making our livelihoods off of human suffering.”
Image credits: Cover photo by Sanya Wason for Al-Hikmah.
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