Students suspended for refusing to clear the MIT encampment have until next week to find housing off campus and say they’re unsure how they’ll continue to pressure the school to cut its financial ties with Israel.

Dozens of protesters marched through the streets of Cambridge shortly after organizers kept their lips tight on next steps during a Friday afternoon news conference on campus, hours after police broke down the encampment and arrested 10.

“The encampment is gone, but the encampment was just one action,” said Dan Zeno, a graduate student who helped organize the tent site on Kresge lawn. “We are always looking forward to next steps to bring plight to what’s happening in Gaza, to the genocide of Palestinians. We’re always looking for how we can safely escalate and bring awareness to the complicity of MIT.”

Zeno is one of the “dozens” of students suspended for returning to the encampment Monday evening, hours after President Sally Kornbluth warned protesters that if they did not leave the Kresge lawn, where tents were set up, by that afternoon, they’d either be suspended, face other sanctions, or both.

Sanctions included a written warning, immediate interim academic suspension for the remainder of the semester and exclusion of participation in commencement and co-curricular activities, and academic suspension and being kicked off the Cambridge campus immediately.

But Zeno said he has until Wednesday to find transitional housing and get off campus with his wife and 5-year-old child.

“Fortunately, we have a very strong community that we built through this movement,” he said. “We have mutual aid funds, so we have a lot of support in our transition.”

The encampment had stood in the middle of campus since April 21 and became what Kornbluth described as a “flashpoint” for pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel students. She said she had “no choice” but to direct the clearing of the tents.

MIT Police, receiving assistance from Cambridge and State Police, arrested 10 protesters who remained in the encampment in the early morning hours after receiving “four separate warnings, in person, that they should depart or face arrest,” Kornbluth wrote in a morning letter.

The arrested protesters appeared in Cambridge District Court later in the morning on trespassing charges and were released, with arraignments continuing in July. Attorneys said they’ll likely drop the charges if the protesters refrain from trespassing on MIT property.

Kornbluth highlighted how she and her administration “tried every path we could to find a way out through dialogue” with the protesters over the past two weeks, and a “professional mediator” was even brought in to meet with the students.

Those who supported the encampment have been calling for the institute to end all research contracts sponsored by the Ministry of Defense of Israel.

“Reaching a solution hinged on our ability to meet the students’ primary demand, which we could not do in a well-principled way that respected the academic freedom of our faculty,” Kornbluth wrote. “Yet though all of us working with the students were hopeful, the students would not yield on their original demand, and negotiation did not succeed.

“And thus we arrived at this morning’s police action – our last resort,” she added.

Graduate student Mohamed Mohamed told reporters he knew the encampment would eventually come down but called the police action an “over-escalation and overstretch by the administration itself.”

“We’re not going to back down just because they used violence,” Mohamed said when asked if any further protests are planned over the weekend. “What we choose next will be made very clear to the community. … We can’t disclose what we’re up to right now because we haven’t had time to plan it.”

Nine MIT undergraduate students and graduate workers were arrested Thursday as they protested in front of a parking garage on the Cambridge campus, according to the MIT Graduate Student Union.

“The escalation of the last few days, involving outside threats from individuals and groups from both sides, has been a tipping point,” Kornbluth wrote in her letter. “It was not heading in a direction anyone could call peaceful.”

Erica James, an associate professor of medical anthropology and urban studies, told reporters that she and her colleagues have been told 75 students face suspension, adding 23 of whom are “of color.”

More than 135 MIT professors have signed a letter seeking answers to concerns around due process, James said. “We are deeply worried about the well-being of our students,” she said.

With the breakdown of the MIT encampment, Harvard is the only remaining college in Greater Boston to have tents still sprung up in protest of the Israel-Hamas war.

Police arrested over 130 protesters at an encampment on the UMass Amherst campus after administrators ordered the students to disperse Tuesday night.

That followed more than 100 arrests at Emerson and Northeastern as police broke down encampments on those campuses in late April. Protesters at Tufts University voluntarily took down their site.

Campus police stand by Kresge Oval. (Libby O’Neill/Boston Herald)
Campus police stand by Kresge Oval. (Libby O’Neill/Boston Herald)
MIT Grounds Crew begins maintenance on the lawn at Kresge Oval. (Libby O’Neill/Boston Herald)