DOJ charges eight U-Michigan divestment activists with up-to-20-year federal felonies over a vandalism-and-threats campaign, a year after state charges against the movement were dropped

On June 10, 2026, federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Michigan unsealed a 63-page grand-jury indictment charging eight pro-Palestinian activists associated with the University of Michigan's divestment movement. The counts — conspiracy to transmit a threat, conspiracy to tamper with a witness, and destruction of property to prevent seizure — carry sentences of five to twenty years. The Justice Department described a coordinated campaign to pressure the university to cut its financial ties to Israel, and announced the charges alongside FBI raids in Ypsilanti. The named defendants are Paige Feyock, Amatullah Hakim, Zainab Hakim, Ahmet Korkaya, Miriam Odeh, Alexander Sepulveda, Colin Weger, and Jonathan Zou; a judge granted bond to four of them two days later.

The conduct the indictment alleges is not protest speech, and The Standing does not present it as such. Prosecutors describe vandalism and graffiti at the homes of the U-M provost and several regents, anti-Israel messages spray-painted at private residences, the placement of fake bloody corpses on an elected board member's lawn, and the defacing of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit — conduct that targets a religious community institution, and that even advocates sympathetic to the defendants have called indefensible. Vandalism, property destruction, and genuine threats are crimes the government may legitimately charge.

The federal case followed the collapse of an earlier, separate state prosecution of the same movement. After police cleared a pro-Palestinian encampment on the U-M Diag in May 2024, state Attorney General Dana Nessel brought trespassing and resisting-police charges against protesters in September 2024; amid allegations of bias and procedural problems, her office dropped those charges, clearing all eleven defendants by May 2025. The eight people now charged federally are largely different individuals accused of different, more serious conduct — but the sequence is the same: a movement pursued first by the state, unsuccessfully, and then by federal authorities with far heavier charges.

What places this in the archive is not the existence of a prosecution but its scale and selectivity. The federal government devoted FBI raids and a stack of five-to-twenty-year felonies — on aggressive theories, including a "destruction of property to prevent seizure" statute normally used to thwart federal seizures, and a witness-tampering count that one legal observer said was thin on evidence of specific threats — to a single campus divestment movement. Civil-rights organizations, including CAIR-Michigan, said the charges "treat pro-Palestine advocacy as terrorism" and blur the line between criminal acts and protected political expression. The action sits within a documented federal pattern of training investigative and prosecutorial power on pro-Palestinian activism.

The Standing records the prosecution as a possible selective and disproportionate use of federal power against a political movement — a separate question from whether the charged vandalism and threats were themselves wrongful, which they may well have been. The proportionality of the charges and any selective-prosecution claim will be tested in court; this entry marks the government's choice to escalate, not a judgment on the defendants' guilt.