Over the past two weeks, pro-Palestine occupations have spread rapidly across US college and university campuses. After Columbia University called on the New York Police Department to clear out a tent encampment of students demanding the university divest from firms profiting from Israeli occupation and apartheid, similar encampments have popped up at dozens of colleges around the country. These occupations have faced similar repression from university administrations as well as hostile media attention, but they don’t appear to be slowing down.

Last Friday, United Auto Workers (UAW) Region 9A organized a rally in New York City’s Washington Square Park in solidarity with the campus protest movement. UAW Region 9A includes unions of higher-education workers at universities around the Northeast where protests have emerged, including at Columbia, New York University, the New School, and elsewhere. UAW members have been among the protesters facing arrests and disciplinary action.

At the rally, Region 9A director Brandon Mancilla spoke in support of the protesters and reiterated the UAW’s demand for a cease-fire in Gaza that the union issued last December. Jacobin’s Nick French sat down with Mancilla to discuss the cease-fire demand, the US labor movement’s complicated history with respect to US foreign policy, and how the UAW is demonstrating solidarity with the campus protesters.