At least 2,100 arrests have been made at pro-Palestinian protests across 40 university campuses in the last two weeks, including more than a thousand since Monday, according to a Spectrum News accounting of police data, university statements, media reports and other sources.

“We are protesting not to assert our First Amendment rights, but we are protesting to end this genocide, we are protesting to call for a dismantling of Zionism, which includes complete divestment” of universities’ financial relationships with Israeli companies and Israel itself, said Fatima Mohammed, an organizer with the New York City-based pro-Palestinian organization Within Our Lifetime, at a press conference on Wednesday. “We call on students in every corner of this country to resist, to stand tall and proud to resist, because as we are protesting, people in [the Gazan city of] Rafah in tents are being bombed.”

“As we are protesting there are people being bombed with our tax money and our tuition,” she added.

On Thursday alone, at least 250 arrests were reported, mostly in the early hours of the morning. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office said 200 were arrested at the University of California, Los Angeles overnight, where police in heavy riot gear descended upon a crowd of more than a thousand with flash-bangs and non-lethal munitions. At New York's Stony Brook University on Long Island, 29 were arrested just after midnight. In Portland, Ore., police arrested 12 around midday as they retook a Portland State University library occupied by protestors, officials there said.

Here are the latest arrest totals for university campus protests:

The protests, which spread to more than 100 campuses across the country after 108 arrests were made at an encampment at Columbia University in New York City on April 18, have increased in quantity and intensity as police crackdowns have become a daily occurrence. Organizers and protesters have said their goals are for their institutions to divest from Israeli companies and weapons manufacturers, as well as pressuring the U.S. to end its support for the war.

More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, the majority women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Over 77,000 have been injured, and at least 7,000 are believed to be missing under rubble. Israel launched its offensive in Gaza after Hamas militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages in an attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, the single-deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

Since then, Israel has destroyed every university in the territory and driven 80% of Gazans from their homes. The U.N. has reported thousands are starving and famine is imminent. Mass graves were found outside hospitals earlier this month with hundreds of bodies, including some found with their hands tied and stripped of their clothes, the U.N. said last month. 

On Thursday, President Joe Biden denounced the violence at some protests in unscheduled remarks from the White House and his rival former President Donald Trump cheered on the police from outside his Manhattan criminal trial. Biden said the protests had not changed his mind about his support for Israel.

“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent. The American people are heard. In fact, peaceful protest is in the best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues,” Biden said. “But, but neither are we a lawless country.  We are a civil society, and order must prevail.”

Despite the backlash and violent police response, the protests show no sign of slowing. As of 5 p.m. EST, Thursday saw the third most arrests of any day in the last two weeks.

By Sunday, more than 1,000 arrests had been made. On Monday, another 143 were arrested across six campuses in Arizona Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico, New Jersey, Texas, and Virginia. Tuesday saw the most arrests of any day of protests by far, with 432 arrests reported, mostly at Columbia University again and the City College of New York, a public school about 20 blocks north in Manhattan. Some of those protesters remained in jail as of Thursday morning, the New York City Council’s Progressive Caucus said, in spite of New York state law that requires arraignments to occur within 24 hours of arrest.

And on Wednesday, 90 of the 197 reported arrests were made at Dartmouth University in New Hampshire, where police in riot gear broke up a protest after dark. Among the arrested was Annelise Orleck, a history professor at the school and the former head of Dartmouth’s Jewish studies program. Video posted by a New Hampshire public radio journalist shows the 65-year-old yelling at police in riot gear before they swarm her, knock her to the ground and drag her away.

“Those cops were brutal to me. I promise I did absolutely nothing wrong. I was standing with a line of women faculty in… their 60s to 80s trying to protect our students. I have now been banned from the campus where I have taught for 34 years,” she wrote on social media. “They tried to hurt me. They did hurt me. And they seemed to enjoy it.”

Another history professor, Steve Tamari of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, said in a statement on Thursday he was still hospitalized after being arrested by police at a Washington University protest in St. Louis. He suffered broken ribs and a broken hand and said he was told by a doctor he was “lucky to be alive.”

While vast majorities of officials from both parties in Washington and throughout the country have denounced the protests, with some Republicans calling for even harsher treatment and the deployment of the National Guard, some elected officials and establishment Democrats have expressed support for the movement. Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., asked “are we in a police state or is this a democracy” as he condemned the police response to protests on the floor of the House on Wednesday. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., the only Palestinian-American in Congress, said in a speech of her own that “we don’t want to have you all in ten years praise the same students for doing what was right years later… we need it now. They deserve it now.”

“I have trespassed in peaceful protest. I have shutdown [government] offices in civil disobedience. I have made the powerful uncomfortable in their routines as I’ve dissented in peaceful but committed disorder,” wrote Patrick Gaspard, the former U.S. ambassador to South Africa during the Obama administration and the former executive director of the Democratic National Committee. “Those are the American traditions of Thomas Paine, David Thoreau, Rosa Parks.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.