New York City Mayor Eric Adams said on Wednesday that "outside agitators" involved in the pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University are attempting "to radicalize young people" across the country.
Adams, in a press conference on the day after New York Police Department officers entered Columbia's Hamilton Hall and other buildings to remove protesters, pushed back on claims that the protests are student-led.
"There were those who came to the city to disrupt our city," Adams said, adding that NYPD Intelligence and Counterterrorism Deputy Commissioner Rebecca Weiner found following an investigation that "outside agitators" are helping organize the protests at Columbia.
"You don't have to have a majority to influence and co-opt an operation," he said.
The editor-in-chief of a Columbia student magazine told CNN in an interview on Tuesday that the priests at the school are "student-fueled" while noting that it's "hard to say" whether or not the protesters arrested in Hamilton Hall were students or people unaffiliated with the university.
Adams said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Wednesday that he was informed of "the extent of the outside agitators" in a letter from the university requesting police support.
He said that an intelligence division confirmed that one "individual's husband was arrested for and convicted for terrorism on a federal level."
Adams did not specify this person's name or the crime for which they were convicted.
The mayor added, "Once we were able to identify some of the other people, I knew that there was no way I was going to allow those children to be exploited the way they were being exploited."
Adams said, "These were professionals" and added, "There are people who are harmful and trying to radicalize our children, and we cannot ignore these outside influences. I don't know if they're international … but there's an attempt to radicalize young people in this country."
The mayor noted, "This needs to be a clarion call for our country. These are our children and we can't allow them to be radicalized like children are being radicalized across the globe."