- Over the past few months, student protests over the disproportionate killings of Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas War have erupted across the nation, including on this lawn at the University of Utah campus.

Students say they're exercising their constitutional rights.

- [All] There is nobody here.

Why are you invited here?

- Students showed up to the University of Utah to demand that our university be accountable to the students in the community.

So we were just calling on the university to like disclose all your ties with Israel, divest completely from Israel, and cut all ties with war profiteering companies.

It was a peaceful protest.

We have a First Amendment right.

We weren't doing anything like property damage or anything like that.

- [Cailley] Among other things, the First Amendment guarantees that Congress shall not abridge the freedom of speech or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.

So while the government cannot prohibit free speech and protests, leaders from Mecha de U of U, a political student organization, argue that institutions like the University of Utah are violating their rights.

- I would like to believe that we have the freedom of speech, being able to say what we want, criticize the university when we know the university is complicit in the genocide.

And on that day, it's kind of was kind of showing that like, hey, we don't have that freedom.

Even if they tell us we do or why we get brutally dispersed, beat up, kicked out.

- [Cailley] The student led movement in Utah was sparked at Columbia University when students set up camp back in April.

Since then, there have been more than 100 encampments on university campuses in the US alone.

And experts say the First Amendment does apply to protests on campus.

- Universities are required to respect students' First Amendment rights, and they can only restrict their expressive activity under certain circumstances.

- [Cailley] Circumstances like breaking the law, which is what the University of Utah says is what happened.

- [Speaker] So university policy and state administrative law is really clear.

There is no overnight camping on campus that's not sanctioned by the school.

- I don't believe the institutio in denying anybody their first speech or first amendment rights.

We just engaged in those that were unlawfully protesting.

- When you look at the other encampments across the United States, they were there for like a lot longer than we were.

But here it was completely different.

They attacked us the first day brutally.

I think the moment really sticks with me.

I was really upfront, I had my hands up.

We were chanting saying like, there is no violence here.

Like, why are you guys in riot here?

And after getting hit a couple times, seeing my friends fall down and I kind of just recognize like, okay, this is like a really dangerous moment.

- Certainly the cases that have made the front page news, I think we would struggle to call any of those a success, right?

What we've seen instead is the criminalization of student protests, the use of excessive force on college campuses, and the calling in not just of campus police, but of city police and state troopers that has caused violence.

- [Cailley] Still, the University of Utah stands by the outcome of their students' pro-Palestinian protest.

- The protest was fine, the words are fine.

It's when the tents went up around 5:15, 5:30 that evening.

That is when the law was broken.

And that's what started the cascading effects of asking law enforcement or having law enforcement do their duty to break that up.

- [Cailley] When it comes to the encampments here at the University of Utah, there have been actual protests where camps were allowed to stay.

- In 1986, a bunch of University of Utah students joined national protests in setting up little shanty towns in the middle of their campus to protest university investments and companies doing business in South Africa as a way to protest the institutional racism.

We were there all day and all night, night after night for months before the university said, okay, we'd like these to go away now please.

And we said no and they said, we insist.

And so we sued them in federal court.

- [Cailley] The judge sided with the students, but he also advised the university to enact some time, place, and manner restrictions for future protests.

And it seems like maybe they have.

- 35 years later, we've implemented different... We follow the law, that's all I can say.

- There may be multiple purposes for why a government enacts in ordinance, some of them legitimate and some of them not and a lot of times, the proof is in the pudding in terms of how it's actually enforced.

- [Narrator] But the activists are undeterred.

- As long as Palestine is under occupation, as long as our government is funding genocide, we're still gonna be here.

- Norda Penya says they're taking the summer to strategize and organize to come back even stronger in the fall.

For PBS Utah, I'm Cailley Chella reporting.