A JUDGE has dismissed felony embezzlement and false pretences charges against a pro-Palestinian University of Michigan graduate student accused of using university funds to buy laptops for a student club.
Her union described the case as an attempt to punish organising against the university’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The charges against Hiab Teshome, a leader of the Graduate Employees’ Organisation (GEO), were thrown out on 7 August. A co-defendant’s case was dismissed at the same time.
Both were involved in organising the May 2024 encampment on the university’s Ann Arbor campus, and both have been organising on behalf of the protesters now facing federal indictment.
Pro-Palestinian advocates described the case against Teshome as a ‘political prosecution’.
Teshome was a co-signer on the laptop purchases for the Blue Talks medical student club.
She did not make the purchase and never possessed the devices.
Another member of the club used a laptop and was reimbursed for it.
The prosecutor’s office alleged that the reimbursement should not have been made because the club was defunct, and that Teshome bore part of the responsibility because she had co-signed.
Organisers say the club was not defunct. The purchase was approved by the university, and while its auditors initially identified a discrepancy, they flagged no wrongdoing.
The Central Student Government, which handles financial discrepancies involving student clubs, also found none. The prosecutor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The investigation and the warrant requests were led by Ryan Cavanaugh, a sergeant with the University of Michigan Police Department who faces allegations in two federal lawsuits that he violated students’ constitutional rights during the university’s multiyear crackdown on Palestine solidarity organising.
Multiple sources with knowledge of the investigation said the warrant requests were highly unusual because Cavanaugh bypassed administrative channels that existed to resolve the dispute.
GEO says his conduct forms part of an ongoing harassment campaign against pro-Palestinian students.
Teshome is also a union leader in tense contract negotiations with the university.
GEO has organised against institutional support for Israel throughout the genocide, in which more than 75,000 Palestinians have been killed and which a United Nations independent commission and Amnesty International have both found to constitute genocide.
‘GEO will not stand for any attempts by the University of Michigan and its collaborators in the legal system to repress Palestine solidarity or labour organising,’ the union said in a statement.
The charges were brought by Eli Savit, the Washtenaw County prosecutor and a so-called progressive lawyer who is running to succeed the term-limited Dana Nessel as Michigan attorney general.
Nessel has led the state’s legal campaign against pro-Palestinian students, charging eleven University of Michigan protesters in September 2024 before dropping every case by May 2025.
Savit secured the Democratic nomination in April over an opponent backed by pro-Israel donors, winning in part because the party’s progressive base regarded him as a break from Nessel and from the political establishment’s unpopular prosecutions and positions on Israel.
That campaign has since shifted to the federal courts. In June, prosecutors in the Eastern District of Michigan unsealed a ten-count indictment against eight pro-Palestinian activists, six of them current or former University of Michigan students, charging conspiracy to transmit threats in interstate and foreign commerce, conspiracy to tamper with a witness, and destruction of property to prevent seizure.
Those named are Paige Feyock, Amatullah Hakim, Zainab Hakim, Ahmet Korkaya, Miriam Odeh, Alexander Sepulveda, Colin Weger and Jonathan Zou. All have pleaded not guilty. Four were released on bond with conditions including GPS monitoring, travel restrictions, surrender of passports and no contact with alleged victims or co-defendants.
At a detention hearing, US Magistrate Judge Anthony Patti described the alleged conduct as terrorising but not terrorism. The prosecutions follow the university’s use of private undercover investigators to surveil student activists, revealed last year, and the raids on activists’ homes in April 2025.
The dismissal in Ann Arbor comes as universities elsewhere in the United States open new fronts against Palestine solidarity organising. Carnegie Mellon University has launched a Title VI civil rights investigation into ten activists over pro-Palestine messages painted on a campus fence that has served as a site for student expression for more than a century, with eight of them barred from campus while the investigation proceeds.
Messages painted in June included a Palestinian flag and a line recording decades of apartheid, occupation and blockade; the university president, Farnam Jahanian, said the accompanying phrase had been read by some Jewish community members as a call to violence.
Jewish students later painted the fence in Yiddish with the motto of the General Jewish Labor Bund and the words ‘Death to Zionism’, which facilities staff repainted after police were called.
When activists subsequently listed fascism, apartheid, Zionism, colonialism and racism in an identical construction, only the word Zionism was censored.
Supporters note that ‘Death to Sexism’ had been painted on the same fence over the summer without intervention.
The American Association of University Professors, Jewish Voice for Peace, Palestine Legal and six other organisations have signed a joint letter demanding that the investigations be dropped and that the university apologise publicly to the students.
Palestine Legal has written to Jahanian arguing that treating anti-Zionist speech as antisemitic relies on stereotypes about Jewish identity and that the university has no legal authority to compel a particular interpretation of what it means to be Jewish.
A day earlier, Haverford College settled a 2024 lawsuit brought on behalf of a group of Jewish students by the Deborah Project, a litigation outfit that brings claims against Palestine advocates.
Under the settlement, the college will treat Zionism as an element of Jewish identity, adopt the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism, require staff to undergo antisemitism training, prohibit students from wearing masks during protests, and establish both an antisemitism committee and a civil rights director to preside over complaints.
The repression is running against the direction of the electorate. On 4 August, Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary over Representative Haley Stevens, overcoming roughly $65 million in outside spending, including more than $30 million from a group affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
El-Sayed has said Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Maya Berry of the Arab American Institute called the result a ‘big deal’, saying voters had not bought an advertising campaign that attacked the candidate rather than his policies.
In Michigan’s 13th district, the democratic socialist state representative Donavan McKinney defeated Representative Shri Thanedar. Next week in Florida’s 25th district, the union organiser and anti-Zionist Oliver Larkin faces Jared Moskowitz, one of Israel’s most reliable supporters in Congress.
None of that has slowed the criminal cases. Trial dates for the eight federal defendants have not been set, and the conditions imposed on them remain in force.
In Ann Arbor, GEO’s contract negotiations with the university continue, with the union warning that the collapse of the case against its leader does not mark the end of the campaign against it.