On 26 March 2025, Unity of Fields interviewed Sammie Lewis, an organizer from Detroit who is still facing felony charges for their involvement in the student intifada at the University of Michigan. The interview transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
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Unity of Fields: What’s up, comrade? It’s really great to have you here with us to talk about what’s been going on with the repression you’re facing. I was personally watching UMich a lot during the encampment moment, and yeah, I’ve been really shocked by the level of repression and also how little attention it has gotten. The state seems adamant about making those felonies stick and I want more people to be outraged by this bullshit and support you. So I guess just to start off the conversation, if you want to explain what the charges are and what’s been going on with your case, the floor is yours.
Sammie Lewis: Sure, yeah. Thank you for having me as well. So there are two active cases that the Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has taken on with felony and misdemeanor charges. The first case being the encampment case. Our Gaza solidarity encampment that happened last spring was violently raided after standing strong for 30 days. It was a place where we built community, where we had teach-ins, a library, we fed people, we were able to offer tents to the unhoused community. And on day 30, the police showed up at roughly six in the morning. I think it was like 5:42 AM and some of us were awake already. We had done night watch—personally, I did night watch throughout the encampment and was kind of observing the changes from the first week to the last week that we were out there. And because there was another raid attempt that was potentially going to happen, and actually in court, the UMPD had testified saying this was supposed to happen, but because we had brought so much community out, they had to cancel it. So we knew that [a raid] wasn’t just something that wasn’t going to happen, but that it would be delayed.
In watching these changes over the next couple weeks, I was able to see small differences in how the police were communicating with security and the ways that they were moving on foot were a little different coming around the encampment, more patrolling. But we ended up finding out that the raid was going to happen. We were confused if it was going to be the Sunday into Monday or the Monday into Tuesday but it ended up being that Monday into Tuesday morning. I remember seeing their drone in the sky just minutes before the raid started. I started waking people up and shouting at the top of my lungs for people to start waking up, that the raid was happening.
In those minutes, I also saw that we were being surrounded by police cars, too many to count. There was a line of riot police and announcements were starting to be made for dispersal orders. And with those dispersal orders as well, they weren’t given the right way. And through our discovery, we learned that the written dispersal order, it was supposed to be the first warning with all the codes and citation stuff and it was supposed to be a 15 minute warning and then the next warning would’ve been 10 minutes. But when they actually came to the encampment to raid it, they told us that it would be 10 minutes until the raid. So they didn’t really follow the written order. And there were multiple ways that showed up and was proven in court that they didn’t follow that order.
But yeah, so we were violently raided.
I had my wrist and arm broken in the raid. Other people suffered respiratory distress from the chemical weapon that was used on us called Deep Freeze, which is the combination of tear gas and pepper spray. And there were people that got concussions as well. So I think there were about four of us that were hospitalized that I know of. It was a very violent day. Four people were arrested that day as well, who are part of the felony cases that have been taken on by Dana Nessel and the Board of Regents. With that, the charges were pending for a really long time. And because the raid happened May 21st of last year…
UoF: Sorry to interrupt, but do you think that they were able to get away with being so violent because it was kind of past the moment when everyone was paying attention to all the encampments? It seems like you guys held out way longer than most, a lot of the raids began in early May. So yeah, I feel like part of what’s at play here is basically the movement had moved on and y’all were still holding it down. And because there was less attention, you guys were more vulnerable to a higher level of violence.
Sammie: I think that that was a really big part of it and also, it was past the point of graduation at U of M. So the campus was pretty clear, it was less eyes watching in general. And I think that was a huge reason why the raid went the way it did. I think they also thought if they gave us enough time then they could just wait us out and we would leave, which is not what happened. So the charges, the felonies in both cases, are resisting and obstruction charges, which in Michigan can only be a felony.
For the encampment case, four people faced misdemeanor charges. And then the other case, the FestiFall case, again, the felonies for two of us are resisting and obstruction, and then the misdemeanor trespassing. The Festifall action, we held a Die-In at the Diag, as the first back to school action, the university’s biggest action of the year. This was to symbolize that there’s no back to school as usual in genocide. Right after an organizer read out the names of one year old martyrs, we were met again with UMPD’s brutality and unnecessary arrests.
In terms of where we’re at with the cases currently…we did just wrap up preliminary exam for the encampment case, which we ended up having two court dates all day long for those. And the judge originally wanted us to come back on 7 April to hear what he decided on in terms of if we’re going to trial or not. But he actually moved it now to 5 May. I think that he is wanting to wait for after graduation for some people, which makes me a little nervous about what his ruling may be. I also think that it’s possible that he dismisses some of my co-defendants, but not all of us.
UoF: The divide and conquer tactic. Singling you out.
Sammie: Yeah, I’ve been very singled out by every cop that testified, so I’m definitely concerned that I will be going on to trial. And then for the FestiFall case, we have preliminary exam on 24 June.
UoF: It’s just crazy to me how little of this information has gotten out. I knew the UMich encampment was violently raided, as were many, but I did not know they used chemical weapons and broke so many bones. I’m also inspired by how you’ve been vocal throughout your case and you haven’t let the repression silence you and you’ve advocated for yourself and your co-defendants even when others in the movement should be stepping up to defend y’all. What does genuine support for people facing state repression look like?
Sammie: I would say that in my experience so far with state repression, that it feels at times very isolating, which I think is also the intention of the state, of course. But I do see it showing up at times within our own organizing, within the broader movement across the US as well. I think that we’re very isolated from each other, which again is intentional, but I think that there’s more that we can be doing to stay in touch, to support each other, to build solidarity. I think that what anti repression work looks like is base building and community building and finding opportunities for people to be more involved, to build awareness, to make sure that people aren’t being abandoned or forgotten about. And to also challenge the ways that the system shows up in every single one of us, whether through white supremacy or patriarchy, and making sure that we’re challenging that in the spaces we’re organizing in to build a stronger movement that can fight against and win against the repression that we face and win liberation for all of us.
UoF: I totally agree with everything you just said, and it was really beautifully put. I have two strains of thought running through my head right now. One is that usually with the more liberal parts of the movement, the reasoning that they use for not supporting people who are being repressed is, “oh, they were being ultra leftists. They went too far.” But it’s interesting because you guys are being repressed so hard for stuff that everyone else was doing. You’re not being repressed for doing something that was tactically beyond the pale or something like that. And it’s wrong to abandon anyone that’s facing this shit, but even by the broader movement’s logic, they’re not holding up their own position on what is considered worth defending, which is…interesting. It makes me wonder about how we collectively plan on fighting these abductions that are becoming increasingly commonplace, most of the time the pretext for them is nothing more than speech.
And then the second point that I want to make, and this is more of a question rather than a comment, is how much do you think being an outside agitator—and I say that lovingly because I am one too, I’m not a uni student, never have been and never will be, thank god—but how much do you think that the outsider status has affected both your case in the eyes of the state and also the way that the movement itself has treated the repression happening towards you, specifically?
Sammie: To comment on your first thought, it reminded me that a lot of these charges too were originally introduced to Eli Savit, who’s the prosecutor in Washtenaw County, who declined to take on these cases. And one of our representatives here, Debbie Dingle—
UoF: Not Debbie Dingle! That’s crazy. The name of a loser in my eyes. Sorry, continue.
Sammie: Dana Nessel recently said in an article that Dingle told her to take on the charges, but recently we confronted Dingle at a town hall and asked if she told Nessel to take on the charges, and she said, no, Nessel offered the university, which I do believe. She has relationships with the Board of Regents, they donate to her campaign. She’s friends with Jordan Acker, who’s one of the Board of Regents and one of the most vocal against us in our pro-Palestine activism and against divestment. So it’s very biased and politically motivated. And at Wayne State University, not too far from here in Detroit, the prosecutor there, Kym Worthy, actually dismissed any potential charges that were coming up for the encampment that was raided. So Dana Nessel is acting entirely on her own here with, of course, the Board of Regents. And it also shows the Palestinian exceptionalism that we see with protests.
Then to answer your other question—yeah, I definitely feel very targeted by this state. I think that being an “outside agitator” definitely adds a lot to it. I think it’s the combination of things. One, of having a history with organizing, and two, being a Black femme and the state upholding their own racism and misogyny. And then three, being this outside agitator, and clearly they’re trying to hold on to this distinction, they refer to me as one of the main instigators. And I think that it’s important to talk about this whole theory that the state has on outside agitators, because we’re also seeing it show up now as students are facing deportation. I think that there’s this attempt to erase the legitimacy of immigrant organizers and non-student organizers and anyone that they think of as “foreign” to their own narrative.
I think it’s a racist trope. That’s from the playbook of segregationists and anti-labor crackdowns as well, it is really trying to deepen this divide that they know exists in our movements. It shows up at times within our movement, within our organizing, as the student/non-student divide. And at U of M, because U of M is such an elite school, a lot of people lack class consciousness, they lack racial consciousness. They’re unaware of the struggle beyond the campus. And so they can think of themselves in a way that really continues the divides that the state has built up along the student/non-student divide. I think that student organizers don’t trust people coming in from the community when actually it’s those of us within the community that have had more history and experience in organizing and in struggle, and we want to share those skills and experiences.
UoF: Right. That’s exactly right. I’m nodding vigorously at everything you’re saying right now. In one of the situations I was working in, that particular student body was, on average, more wealthy. It was not a public university and so the outside agitator thing really took on this racialized and classed dimension. And to build on a point that you made earlier, about how in order to counter repression we have to see the way that the system shows up in our own thinking and behavior, it was wild to be in these spaces and risking a lot to be there—because we love this movement and we know how important the student movement is, especially if you know your history—and wanting to offer the experience we have and just be a soldier and then to see some of the students regurgitating these really racist tropes, these really classist tropes, these tropes about being endangered by people who are non-students and at times they were not really having the same smoke for the pigs or the admin. Sometimes it felt like they were scared of the poor hordes coming in to put them in a vulnerable position and ruin their upward mobility.
In those moments, the outsiders were having to fight on two fronts, really. We were thinking about the state, and then we were also having to combat these reactionary ideologies that were held by our own comrades. Outsiders have historically been essential in these student uprisings but combatting the student paradigm when it was held so dogmatically, that was exhausting work. It was tremendously difficult to struggle through that and not give up on each other. And I’m ultimately glad that we did that work, in my case we all came out stronger and more unified. I think that there has been a lot of success in moving the needle on that front, but that divide has been one of our weakest points as a movement and the way I see it, this is the contradiction of class appearing. A lot of us outside agitators are wage workers, migrants, displaced people, homeless, lumpen, uneducated rabble. A lot of us have no illusions about upward mobility but we are ready to fight and yes, die. We’re not worried about an ivy diploma because an ivy diploma registers as class violence to us and we aren’t wrong to think that.
None of this is to say that all students are bougie or some stupid shit like that but I’m just trying to call it how I saw it and felt it and struggled through it.
Sammie: Absolutely. Yeah.
UoF: If we’re serious about defeating this new wave of repression coming down right now, we’re going to need to break down this privileged category of student and all of the liberal hang ups that come with it. I find that on certain campuses and around certain groups, most of these groups schew more wealthy, I have to get them to recognize that the repression is happening because Biden—and all these Democrats, like the Attorney General prosecuting you—set the stage for Trump. This isn’t some Trump-era anomaly.
Also, people have largely ignored the prisoners of the George Floyd Rebellion and the Stop Cop City cases and Casey Goonan’s case and your case and that has made us weaker. The position you’ve taken to speak out against the charges is inspiring because the state wants us to quiet down, that’s part of the point of all this.
Sammie: I keep having this, I don’t know, back and forth on things too, because I have always been a very visible organizer and not by choice. I think in 2020, it was something that was forced on me and not something I got to decide for myself. And now I would probably be moving differently in protest depending on the protest. However, I think that there’s still definitely part of me that thinks that there’s also power and being visible again, depending on what it is, of course. But the state and the system as a whole, it does everything that it can to silence people that look like me and for my own history and my ancestors, I refuse to silence myself. And that happens also in the spaces I organize in. I’m not going to make myself smaller. I’m not going to allow myself to be blueprinted. I’m going to show up fully as I am and for my principles and values.
I have definitely been targeted since the raid. Like I said, my wrist and arm were broken in the raid. I believe I was the only person in the raid that had a baton that wasn’t just pushed at me, but struck me swinging, which hit my jaw.
I mean, I had multiple people say that they felt afraid for my life, that they watched how I was treated in the raid, and it was more aggressive than others. There’s actually a point in my discovery though, where they refer to me as clenching my fists and standing my ground. So I guess they were also afraid of me.
There’s a point, which they showed this in court too, in the videos. I’m just going down the line of cops saying, “You’re so fucking tough. You’re so tough.” And this one officer starts just hitting my throat with a baton, and I just refuse to allow him and his baton to make me scared, so I kept screaming, “Come for my throat again. Come for my fucking throat again.” And in this little way, it made him question his own power, that he was abusing. We had the right to protest them and to defend one another, defend our camp. As I’ve said, they were brutalizing us, using excessive force. It was us, maybe 30 of us, with nothing but the clothes on our back, and police in riot gear. Our only weapons were our voices.
But of course, I have been also very targeted. Over the summer, I had my car impounded. I was pulled over in a pretextual stop for my brights being on, and I didn’t have my license on me and said it was at a friend’s house, and they were like, “Okay, just call a friend to come and drive your car.” And I was like, okay. And then they came back to my car and said, “Get out. We’re impounding the car.”
And mind you, this was after being very surveilled. There were times I knew I was being followed by UMPD. There’s a time I parked near a friend’s house that they just watched me park. There was a facility truck the week that my car was impounded that drove by me really slowly, and I was sure they were looking at my license plate and any identifiable information. And so it was the day before my car was impounded that there was an incident on the Diag, not really related to us, but somebody was being arrested for stickering. And some of us showed up, and I thought to myself, okay, they know who I am. If I show up, they’re going to target me more. It didn’t stop me, but they did the next day pull me over.
UoF: Wow. So they were definitely surveilling you and stuff like that. That is wild.
Sammie: Another person who’s also facing a misdemeanor in the encampment case is facing the misdemeanor in the FestiFall case, so he and myself are both people being double targeted in these cases, as Black organizers nonetheless. However, I am facing another felony in this case as well, which shows the misogynoir of the state.
One other thing that came up for me talking about what it’s like to be repressed even in your own organizing spaces, is that there’s been a lot of, well, anytime we talk about the charges, some people have said things like, “We need to center Gaza,” or “there’s a genocide going on,” and it’s so frustrating because it’s like, this is directly linked. Like what do you mean? It’s Palestinian exceptionalism, we are targeted so harshly because it’s about Palestine.
UoF: That’s such a good point to make, especially as a Black organizer facing down the police state. And this is something that we’ve come up against quite a bit in our own situations. But really when you think about it for more than 10 seconds, it’s so obvious. We’re being repressed for the work that we have done in endeavoring to stop the imperialist and colonial genocide that this fucking pig country is committing. It could not possibly be more about Gaza. Gaza could not be more central to the thing. And I’ll be frank here, oftentimes that kind of argument is mobilized by people who aren’t taking the big risks. So, really what they’re saying is that they would rather us shut the fuck up so that they can hold another 15 cultural events in a row, things that cost themselves and the enemy nothing, while the US drops the equivalent of nuclear bombs on people who have been forced to live in tents. It’s just kind of insane, it’s a total abdication of our role and responsibility as strugglers in the core.
And at the same time, on a very practical level, how the hell are we supposed to continue fighting if the state is trying to throw fucking felonies at us? Counter-repression is our bread and butter and it actually grounds the material stakes of the struggle in our own lives. It’s no longer a moralistic abstraction. The consequences are real. This should raise our consciousness and make our analysis of the enemy sharper, our tactics more aggressive, our skin thicker. It should not lead us into a position of guilt and retreat. What we need is radical militancy, radical political subjectivity. We are no longer spectators to the suffering of the global majority but radical political actors who are willing to fight and die and face the consequences to stand with the oppressed majority of the world. And many of us taking these risks are nationally oppressed ourselves, so, we see our people in Gaza. How is this not centering Gaza? This is us saying that Gaza is the center of the entire world. We are saying loud and clear, Gaza will not fight alone. Never again will Gaza fight alone. Never again will Yemen fight alone. Our ranks here are small but we are determined and getting tougher by the minute.
For all the lip service that is paid to interconnectedness about the Deadly Exchange and “XPD, KKK, IOF, you’re all the same”…the repression coming down on us is the very manifestation of that. Why the hell would we obscure that? If we are understanding the police as the equivalent of the IOF, as an occupying colonial force and imperial army here in our own neighborhoods, the only logical conclusion is that we need to be resisting them. And really, I think that’s what the contradiction comes down to—that some people want to support resistance as an abstraction and maybe say they support the armed struggle in Palestine, but when it comes to us resisting here, they want to abdicate themselves from that responsibility, and ultimately mystify the United States’ role in all of this.
Sammie: Yeah, I agree with all of that. And think all of that was really well said. I think that something I see at times with the student movement is that a lot of people are also just afraid, which is understandable. As somebody facing the repression, of course, sometimes it can get scary, and I don’t want it to stop us. When we’re scared of the repression to the point that we’re stagnant, then it just shows that it’s working. And I think that to truly resist the repression, to truly resist for Palestine, we need to be able to continue through the fear.
We need to be able to tell each other, “Hey, it’s okay that you’re afraid. I’m afraid too, but we still need to do this.” That’s what I’m seeing as something that’s missing across the US. I can’t remember what zine it was part of, but I actually have a quote here in my notebook: “Of course, we are afraid, but we have always been afraid. But this way, even if just for one second, we get to make those we’re scared of afraid too.”
UoF: That’s very George Jackson-esque.
Sammie: I don’t think it was George Jackson. It was part of a zine that I just don’t have right now.
UoF: It’s an amazing quote. Maybe we can put it on the back of this zine cover.How can people follow for updates or show up to y’all’s next court dates? That’s something that made going to court a lot more bearable for me, is having people there.
Sammie: Well, right now the [TAHRIR] Coalition is using Telegram, the same Telegram that we used in the encampment to talk about court and to send updates. And that’s probably the best place to follow, and the TAHRIR Instagram and Twitter.
UoF: It’s been an honor to interview you, and it’s really important people learn about yall’s case and show some support. In many ways, Unity of Fields was created because us and our comrades were facing repression and didn’t have outlets like these for our voices to be directly heard without compromising our militant politics. So I hope getting this interview out there is useful, even in a small way, for your case and for the movement as a whole, since more repression is undoubtedly coming our way and the only thing we can do is prepare to resist it, and let go of our fear. Any last words?
Sammie: I guess the last things I would say is we maintain our innocence and believe nothing we did was wrong, that it can never be wrong to stand against a genocide. And the other thing I’d say is that we do need each other. We do owe each other. We need to be able to build a self-sustained community of organizers that don’t need to rely on the government, so that way we can continue to fight. And that means being able to show up for one another through repression. That means being able to fully resist. And that means being able to practice the things that we can do right now, things that we imagine in our future.
UoF: Exactly right. That’s a beautiful note to leave on. Thank you.
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