UCSC seizes phone of student arrested at encampment, university accused of retaliation for lawsuit

Attorneys representing a student plaintiff in a lawsuit against the UC Regents and UC Santa Cruz administration for temporary campus bans after last spring’s pro-Palestine protests said she had her phone wrongfully seized for a search warrant, according to KQED. 

Laaila Irshad is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed last month on behalf of students and a professor who were temporarily banned from UCSC’s campus, claiming their suspensions were illegal and caused “great harm” during the last two weeks of the spring quarter. 

According to KQED, less than a week after fall quarter went into session, Irshad’s phone was seized by university police, attorneys said. The seizure occurred while she stood outside her dormitory, where she works as a resident assistant, after a fire alarm went off early on Oct. 1. 

The warrant was based on a sealed affidavit that outlines “probable cause to believe the phone’s contents include evidence of a felony,” KQED said.

American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California Attorney Chessie Thacher, one of the attorneys representing Irshad, said her team has reason to believe the warrant is unrelated to the protest and the separate but related civil rights lawsuit. She said the search warrant had a photo of Irshad talking to a news reporter on it, as opposed to her student ID photo, and was served in a public way.

​​“This just feels like it has a retaliatory motive or intent, or an attempt to kind of say to Ms. Irshad: ‘Proceed with caution because we are intent on silencing your speech,” Thacher said to KQED.

Attorneys representing students filed a motion on Oct. 11 declaring that Irshad plans to petition the court to destroy or void the warrant, return her phone, order the destruction of all seized information and unseal the affidavit after a hearing in December. 

UC Santa Cruz spokesperson Scott Hernandez Jason said in an email to KQED that the warrant was related to an “active investigation that began prior to the lawsuit” and gave no further information.

UCLA alum arrested for illegal possession of arms near Trump rally

A UCLA alum was arrested Oct. 12 outside a campaign rally for former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump, according to the Daily Bruin. 

The man, Vem Miller, was found to be in possession of a shotgun, a loaded handgun and a high-capacity magazine after being stopped at a checkpoint on Avenue 52 and Celebration Drive in Coachella, California, a Riverside County Sheriff’s Department press release said. 

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said to Southern California News Group that he believed that Miller planned to kill Trump at the rally that day. The department caught Miller at a checkpoint within its double-perimeter, which controlled access within a mile of the rally. Miller was taken to a jail in Indio, California. 

Miller graduated from UCLA in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree in American literature. He is 49 and is a registered Republican in Nevada. He ran unsuccessfully for District 13 in the Nevada state assembly. 

According to reporting by the Press-Enterprise, Bianco said Miller purportedly was part of a sovereign citizen movement — an “anti-government group whose members consider themselves exempt from government statutes unless they give consent to them.” 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is also questioning another man who was stopped at a checkpoint after being flagged by bomb-detecting dogs, Bianco said according to the Press-Enterprise. 

The incident did not appear to affect the rally’s proceeding or safety of Trump and its attendees. Miller was released the same day on $5,000 bail and is scheduled to appear in court at Indio Larson Justice Center on Jan. 2, 2025.

A version of this article appeared on p. 2 of the Oct. 16, 2024 edition of the Daily Nexus.

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Lizzy Rager
Lizzy Rager (she/her) is the Lead News Editor for the 2024-25 school year. She can be reached at lizzyrager@dailynexus.com