The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are bringing you another urgent addition to our ongoing series, Police State University, where we’ve been speaking with graduate workers, faculty, and students at different colleges and universities about the federal assault on our institutions of higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. And over the course of the past year and a half, we’ve spoken a number of times with graduate student workers, with student workers of Columbia University, United Auto Workers, and with workers and union members with the Graduate Employees Organization at the University of Michigan, my old university and my old union.

We’ve spoken about federal abductions of pro- Palestine student protestors like Mahmoud Khalil, Trump’s gangster style shakedown of Columbia University and other universities involving massive funding cuts and withholding of federal grants. We’ve talked about Columbia firing and expelling grant minor. The president of the student workers of Columbia just before bargaining sessions with the union and the administration were set to begin. And we got an on the ground account last April of law enforcement officers, including FBI agents, raiding the homes of multiple student organizers connected to Palestine solidarity protests at the University of Michigan and all at the direction of Michigan Attorney General, Dana Nessel, by the way. And now we have another really grim and urgent update for y’all. And I’m going to give you as much context as I can by reading from a really essential piece that was published in Mondeweiss and was written by Yarden Katz and Stephen M.

Ward. We’re going to link to it in the show notes, but Katz in Ward write in this piece, “In the early morning hours of June 10th, 2026, the FBI conducted raids against individuals involved in Palestine solidarity activism at the University of Michigan. With help from local and state police departments, including the University of Michigan police, the raids unfolded simultaneously in Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. In Ypsilanti, Michigan, agents and military gear rolled into a neighborhood in an armored vehicle with guns drawn, terrorizing families and neighbors. A similar raid took place in Chicago. In total, seven of the eight accused individuals were arrested. One was out of the country. The case is now known as the Michigan eight. The Justice Department indicted the eight defendants, five of whom are current or former students at the University of Michigan and one of whom was a university employee on multiple counts of severe charges, including conspiracy to transmit threats in interstate and foreign commerce.

The defendants all in their twenties now potentially face decades in prison. The main actions described in the indictment boil down to property damage directed against the offices or homes of University of Michigan officials. The facilities of Rolls Royce, which makes parts for Israeli army tanks and Maersk, which ships military equipment to Israel and the building of the Jewish Federation of Detroit, a major pro- Israel organization. No person has been physically harmed by these actions, yet the indictment paints these actions as a form of anti-Semitic terrorism, drawing on the FBI’s extensive digital surveillance of the defendants. This narrative was crafted by the masters of deception, Trump’s Justice Department, and it does not stand up to scrutiny. While we do not know who was behind the actions because the defendants have pleaded not guilty, it is clear the actions have nothing to do with anti-Jewish racism or terrorism.

So that’s what we’re dealing with right now. And to talk about all of this, I am very grateful to be joined on the show by two guests. First, we’ve got Kevin Zheng, a member organizer and the secretary of the Graduate Employees Organization, a labor union that represents thousands of graduate workers at the University of Michigan. And we are also joined by Grace Vacito, a restaurant worker and former grad student at the University of Michigan. Kevin, Grace, thank you both so much for joining me today, especially with all of this craziness going on. I wanted to just turn things over to you and ask if you could lay everything out for our listeners. What do we know as of right now? And could you give us a sort of on the ground view of what this has all looked and felt like for y’all back there in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti over these past two crazy weeks?

Grace Viscito:

Yeah. Well, thanks for having us. These raids have been really shocking, I would say, for folks in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti and across the Midwest. It felt like the bit like they came out of nowhere last, I guess a week and a half ago, I think most of us woke up to just a lot of really startling scenes and we weren’t sure where our friends were. For myself, I live in Ypsilanti. I’m neighbors with one of the houses that was raided, the one in Ypsilanti. I was there and the FBI showed up, they threw flashbangs into the upstairs bedrooms. They used the battering rams attached to vehicles to break down the doors and then they made the people inside the house walk across the broken glass to get to the street. And so these raids were very shocking, very violent. There was definitely a shock and awe element to how they went in and arrested these people in a way that seems totally disproportionate to what’s being alleged in the indictment.

Since then, seven people were initially detained, as you said, they’ve all been released on bond over the last week or so. So no one is currently detained, but they’re facing these really serious charges that carry, as you said, between five and 20 years in prison, which is a really intimidating prospect to be looking at. And notably, they’re not being charged with vandalism or with anything relating to the underlying acts alleged in the indictment. They’re being charged with conspiracy to transmit a threat. And so this is a very intimidating charge, a really scary prospect to be facing down and definitely an escalation by the federal government in their ongoing repression of the movement for Palestine here in Michigan and across the country.

Kevin Zheng:

The defendants were released on bond a few days after their initial arrest. And this is actually after the prosecution claimed that they would be a danger to the community, claimed that they were dangerous terrorists. They had quite sensationalized vitriolic language to describe these young activists and the judge didn’t buy it. Ultimately, they were released on bond and ultimately they are able to return home and sleep in their own beds, albeit with a number of conditions to uphold. But yeah, it’s just kind of another sign that this seems to be quite a politically motivated process that they’re trying to put these people through.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and of course we are seeing these kinds of targeted attacks on Palestine solidarity protestors at different campuses and different parts of the country, but we’re also seeing between the time this story broke and I heard about it from y’all to the time that we started recording about it, that we also had 15 people in Minnesota who are being hunted down, arrested and charged with all these crazy charges from the federal government for observing ICE and exercising their constitutional rights in the midst of a federal invasion of the state of Minnesota. So this is so dark and so heavy and also so normalized at this point. I wanted to kind of hover on that if it’s okay because I wanted to ask you guys what does it felt like on and around campus?

Kevin Zheng:

Yeah, I would say on campus the climate is tough. You mentioned private security, private surveillance. The university was trailing my coworkers with private security simply because they chose to speak out against the genocide. That was threatening enough to the university that they felt the need to hire all of these private contractors to spy. We’ve also seen the university kind of use these anachronistic internal judicial processes that are non-transparent that basically have guaranteed outcomes of convictions, let’s call them, that have just sucked up time and energy from these students that were simply exercising their right to speech on campus. So yeah, I would say that the climate, the energy here on campus is not one that’s supportive of speaking out. This latest round of raids we just needed to respond as we have always responded to any challenges that get thrown at us. This is yet another moment and yet it’s hard to forget that this is, in this case, the federal government going after these students and workers, not just the university, not just the state, but now the federal government is involved.

So it is a significant escalation. I think for a lot of the activists in this area, that escalation is felt like we see that clearly and know that this fight is going to be a long and hard fight ahead.

Grace Viscito:

At the same time, it seems particularly with these raids in Minneapolis and across the Midwest that the federal government is really just starting to throw anything at the wall to see what sticks. And for us, it really seems like a time to continue to double down, to organize for Palestine to keep ice out of our communities because at this point these charges are so ridiculous. All of these sort of attempts at federal repression have become so ridiculous at this point that it’s clear that there’s nothing else for us to do then to continue.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So what can you guys tell us about the charges themselves? What’s at the center here, property damage that is being cited in these charges and could you say more about what exactly is the government trying to claim about the Michigan eight?

Grace Viscito:

I mean, fundamentally, these charges are an attack on political speech because no one is being charged with property damage. No one’s being charged with vandalism. The government is trying to criminalize phrases of the movement for Palestine, like free Palestine, Long Live the Intifada, these phrases in this language that has been used by the movement for decades and they’re trying to argue that these things constitute a criminal act and to personalize these demands for divestment and end to the complicity in the genocide in Gaza, which has again, long been a demand of the movement. And so essentially these charges are, they’re trying to criminalize this speech and remove it from the political context that it exists within. I think it’s also important to remember that the indictment from which all of this is drawn is just that. It’s an indictment. It’s basically a press release from the Department of Justice.

It’s not a statement of facts or an objective truth. So all of the information that we’ve been working with thus far is basically the state’s version of what happened and the story that they want to tell. I think that’s also an important piece of context to keep in mind here.

Kevin Zheng:

Yeah. And a similarity in the Michigan eight case as well as the recent raids in Minnesota, one of the similarities here is that in both indictments, the defendants are accused of using encrypted messaging services like Signal. So part of these indictments is also drawing from evidence retrieved from encrypted messaging apps and that the use of these apps is essentially a conspiracy to commit something is also part of the framing that the government is trying to put forward, which as a digital scholar, I don’t buy in and I’m worried about that kind of path.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I think in the country that we live in now, sadly, we all need to be worried about that. I mean, but it’s not new, but they’re developing new ways to try to make it stick, right? Because I think back to when I was there living in Ann Arbor, reporting on people who lived in Ypsilanti who were part of the J20 group that protested Trump’s first inauguration back in 2016 and because they wore black block attire masks, black sweaters and stuff like that, they tried to argue then that anyone who was wearing black was conspiring to commit federal felony crimes. And so you got a similar thing here where it’s like, yeah, just by using Signal app, which everyone fucking uses, pardon my French, that’s somehow indicative of your criminal complicity in some grand conspiracy. But I guess I wanted to really underline for folks who are listening and again, we’re not hiding anything here.

You can go look at the sort of visual evidence in that Mondeweiss piece and other pieces we’ll link to You can see the quote unquote property damage of like long lived the antifada written on the sidewalk in front of the Rolls-Royce facility in Novi, Michigan, a facility that produces parts for the Israeli military vehicles. And you also had like Maersk, as we said, they ship military equipment to Israel and the Jewish Federation of Detroit has on their website and their social media like a lot of pro- Israel, pro- Zionist kind of stuff. So it’s not like these are just synagogues and Jewish homes being targeted at random. These are sites that are clearly being targeted because of their connection to the war crimes happening in Israel. But as I understand it, the government is trying to sort of use those demonstrations, that property damage to tie any of these activists to basically to paint them as terrorists, right?

To say that they are Hamas loving, Hamas supporting Hamas ideology adopting radicals in our midst and that’s why they need to have the hammer come down on them. So again, that’s as I understand it, kind of where things stand right now, but I wanted to sort of ask you guys if you could help us fill that in. Where do things stand right now?

Grace Viscito:

Fundamentally, I feel like the raids, these indictments have rocked our communities and they’ve been very scary, particularly for those who are directly targeted. At the same time, they’re a distraction from the very real violence of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank in Southern Lebanon. This has continued for years and it is ongoing as we speak. I think what can be done is to continue to organize as we have been, to continue to organize for divestment and for boycotts within the institutions that we’re a part of, be it the unions that we’re in or whatever other institution we happen to be a part of. These are strategies that work and that we have to continue to push forward. At the same time, the repression is a very serious thing and it does warrant a very serious defense campaign to keep folks safe and there are some more immediate steps we can take that maybe Kevin can speak to.

Kevin Zheng:

Yeah. These defendants are facing a pretty long drawn out legal process and that’s not going to be cheap. We have an ongoing legal fundraiser going on bit.ly/UMLegalFund Good lawyers are not cheap and we’re up against a pretty big foe here and it’s the federal government. I think they’re not going to stop until it’s over. And so that’s kind of an immediate ask. We’re also as union members trying to develop strategies around writing and releasing solidarity statements. I know that a number of Palestine advocacy orgs have released a number of statements recently and those have been really awesome. We’re working within our union and with other unions to try to figure out how might we mount a pressure campaign at our own institutions on these issues. The other thing is that our union here on campus right now is actively in bargaining and negotiations with our employer with the University of Michigan.

And we had a number of demands that we passed over to our employer, things like anti-repression, getting ICE off campus, getting the campus police off campus, stopping cooperation with ICE, non-disclosure of felony charges. These are all kind of things that were basically immediately rejected by the university for not being workplace issues, but these are very clearly affecting my workplace here at the university. These are my friends, my community members that are facing these charges as a result of their speech on campus. So yeah, continuing to put pressure within our own unions, at our own workplaces, I think that’s going to be a long-term fight that is going to be really important to fight.

Maximillian Alvarez:

This is a show called Working People. I’ve been interviewing union members, non-union members, but workers of all stripes about their lives, their jobs, the things that impact us as working class people. And this is one of them, but I wanted to sort of give y’all the last word on that front if you had anything you wanted to share with listeners out there who maybe are still like, “Well, yeah, this is important, but this isn’t a worker issue, this isn’t a labor issue, or how is this a working class issue?” Anything that you wanted to share with fellow working class folks or union members out there who may be listening to this?

Kevin Zheng:

I think as workers, and our employer doesn’t want this to be known, but we have a lot of leverage. We have a lot of leverage at the bargaining table. We have a lot of leverage when we go into a grievance meeting with our coworkers by their side, we have these kind of pressure points that we’re able to press on because we provide essential labor to our workplaces and to society. It is in some ways our duty or responsibility to make sure that our work doesn’t further genocide, that doesn’t further fascism. And I would say that this is a working class issue because no one should have to live in fear. No one should have to live in this kind of world. We have to imagine something and build something bigger and better than what we have right now. And one way that we can do that is through our power as workers.

Grace Viscito:

I mean, I think as workers in the United States, we have more in common with workers in Palestine than we do with the administrators at the university. We’re exploited by the same forces. And so like Kevin said, we have a duty to keep organizing for liberation for all of us. I think also it’s important to think about this oppression in context. The charges against these eight people are an attack on an entire movement, like the entire movement for Palestine. The federal government doesn’t want to stop with just these eight people. If they’re able to secure charges against them, they want to continue and they will not hesitate to turn these same tools against the labor movement against any other movement for liberation here in the United States. And so it’s really important to remember that this attack on our comrades is not limited to just a small group of people in Michigan.

It’s just one attempt to repress the movement.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Kevin Zhang, a member organizer and the secretary of the Graduate Employees Organization, a labor union that represents thousands of graduate workers at the University of Michigan and also Grace Vicito, a restaurant worker and a former grad student at the University of Michigan. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring about this. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our different social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.

I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.