At a weekly meeting hours after several of its members were arrested during LSU’s presidential search committee meeting, Students for a Democratic Society outlined its future plans.

Despite the arrests, SDS President Margo Wilson said the group will continue their “No MAGA president” campaign calling for a search committee more inclusive of student opinion. Club leaders also expressed outrage at the arrests, particularly that of Gabriela Juárez.

Juárez was pulled away by LSUPD officers and taken into custody after refusing to yield her time during public comment during the search committee meeting. She was later taken to the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison and released Wednesday evening on $1,000 bond, SDS members told the Reveille.

“We got to emphasize the escalation to this criminal misdemeanor charge from going over time at a committee meeting,” SDS member Zane Sutor-Benfield said at the meeting. “It’s outrageous.”

SDS response

Wilson outlined what she called a “heavy-handed” defense campaign following the Wednesday arrests, beginning with a “Phone Zap” campaign to mass call EBRSO and demand Juárez’s release.

Sutor-Benfield said the club also mobilized about 10 to 20 members to protest Juárez’s arrest in person outside the EBR Parish Prison while she was held there.

SDS next plans to create a GoFundMe to raise money for the arrested students’ legal fees and Juárez’s bond. Wilson also said she will be posting her court dates publicly to encourage SDS attendance.

“We’re going to keep fighting this, every step of the way,” Sutor-Benfield said.

SDS previously planned to hold a rally on Thursday at 4:30 p.m. against Landry’s call for the deployment of the National Guard to Louisiana cities. The rally will still be held but will now also be in broader opposition to police violence, relating to what Sutor-Benfield said was a disproportionate response to Juárez’s actions on Wednesday.

“I think that this is such a significant escalation and a show of force. So, so overdone. Like they’re overdoing it,” Wilson said.

The arrests

The meeting occurred after seven SDS members were arrested at the presidential search committee meeting Wednesday morning. Gabriela Juárez, a junior, was charged with resisting an officer and interfering with an educational practice.

Juárez was physically removed from the building by two LSUPD officers after she went over her allotted three minutes for her public comment.

Wilson said Juárez and Enola Guyer were “violently” dragged out of the building at this point. Juárez also shouted obscenities toward the officers and search committee members as she was removed.

Juárez was then cuffed and placed into an LSUPD car. From here, other SDS members blocked the car from leaving, linking arms around the vehicle. Wilson defended this, saying the police did not tell them where they were transporting Juárez.

Enola Guyer, a senior majoring in animal sciences, was charged with resisting an officer, obstruction of highway commerce and prohibiting an educational practice. The other five students were arrested for resisting an officer and obstruction of highway commerce. They, along with Guyer, were released by LSUPD with a misdemeanor and a future court date.

Juárez’s court hearing is Thursday afternoon.

Wilson said Juárez would be seeking private counsel, but she and other members will use a public lawyer during these dates.

“I plan on being extremely public about how my case is going, what I’m being charged with,” Wilson said. “I think that being public has been shown to be the most effective way to get the charges dropped.”

SDS was primarily there to express their belief that many of the committee’s members were selected because of their proximity to Gov. Jeff Landry and that the committee didn’t adequately represent LSU students.

Wilson connected the group’s critiques of the search committee to the removal and firing of LSU Law professor Ken Levy and the university’s removal of diversity from its websites and programming, saying she thinks these indicate priorities that oppose student interests.

“These are business owners that are just stakeholders in the university, and what the makeup of the search committee shows us is that LSU is a business, it is not a school, and they are not beholden to student interest. They are beholden to Jeff Landry and the interest of their shareholders,” Wilson said.