On Thursday, demonstrators gathered at Foley Square for the NYC Rally for the Right to Learn to stand up against recent policy demands from the Trump administration aimed at colleges and universities.

“There’s strength in numbers and if these people, if they’ve showed up here, if students showed up here, I need to be here,” Rotua Lumbantobing, Vice President of the American Association of University Professors, said.

Columbia University was the first major institution to have funding singled out by the Trump administration in response to protests at the university last spring deemed antisemitic.

Demands from the federal government to the university include no longer allowing students to wear masks on campus for the purpose of concealing identities; placing its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years; and adopting a new definition of antisemitism.

Demonstrators say the administrations’ threats to cut funding are coercion and censorship.

“We’ve seen in recent months these attacks on students specifically over free speech in defense of Palestine, but it’s connected to a wider struggle on the attacks of immigrants,” Edison Routh, a senior at Hunter College, said.

Two Columbia students specifically targeted: Mahmoud Khalil and Moshen Madawhi. Both in custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement following their involvement leading pro-Palestinian protests at the school last year.

“What the government is doing has absolutely nothing to do with security. It is entirely about repression,” Baher Azmy, attorney for Khalil, said.

“They want to make life in America for any foreigner, student or not, so miserable that people simply don’t want to come,” New School professor Jeremy Varon said.

This as more than a thousand students at colleges and universities from across the country have had their visas revoked or legal status terminated since late March.

In a statement last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, in part, “If you are in this country on a student visa and are a participant in those movements, we have a right to deny your visa. We are not going to be importing activists into the United States.”