The House Education and Workforce Committee is seeking a briefing with Daniel Biss, mayor of Evanston, Ill., alleging that he refused to provide Northwestern University with sufficient police support to dismantle an anti-Israel encampment on campus in spring 2024.
Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), chair of the committee, wrote in a Jan. 28 letter to Biss—who is currently running for Congress in Illinois’s 9th Congressional District—that he has “grave concern regarding your failure to protect Jewish students.” (JNS sought comment from Biss.)
Walberg cited a December letter Biss sent to then-U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, in which the mayor wrote that “we denied” Northwestern’s request for city police to “arrest peaceful campus protesters.” Walberg said the encampment was “a hotbed of antisemitic harassment and hostility, including multiple alleged assaults and virulently antisemitic signage.”
“Multiple Jewish students experienced blatant antisemitism during the encampment,” Walberg wrote, noting that a Jewish student wearing a yarmulke reported being spat at, while another student recording the encampment alleged being assaulted by a participant.
Walberg added that yet another student recalled being told to “go back to Germany and get gassed,” while others reported being called “dirty Jew” and “Zionist pig.”
“Despite these repeated and documented incidents of antisemitism and harassment, the Evanston Police Department—at your direction—did not assist in clearing the encampment,” Walberg stated. “Indeed, committee documents show that Northwestern was looking to arrest protesters on April 26 but was unable to do so with ‘too few police to safely get this done’ due to your refusal to provide support.”
Walberg included internal messages among university officials at the time, such as one from Michael Schill, then-president of the university, stating that Biss told him, “Our position has not changed.”
“The plan was to arrest and put on probation at 7 a.m. this morning,” Schill wrote. “That plan is on hold now since we have too few police to safely get this done.”
In a later message, Schill wrote that he had heard from someone that Biss likely “wouldn’t provide police support” and that “Biss is likely to tell folks to shore up his progressive credentials.”
According to Walberg, Biss also condemned the university’s settlement with the Trump administration as being “blackmail.”
“Considering your recent interest in campus conduct and anti-discrimination efforts at Northwestern, the committee requests a briefing on, in your words, ‘local law enforcement coordination’ when it comes to antisemitic activity on college campuses in Evanston,” Walberg stated, adding that the briefing would help lawmakers determine whether new legislation addressing antisemitic discrimination is needed.
In response to the committee, Biss stated that he had a discussion with police at the time about the impact on public safety and free speech of sending police to clear the encampment.
“We all concluded that it did not make sense to do that, so I took the advice of the police and did not,” he said. “Now all of a sudden, years later, Republicans in Congress are making a bunch of noise about it.”
Biss added that “this is part of a broader effort to shut up anybody who doesn’t agree with them.”
