Did Biden have protesters arrested by presidential orders during his term?
Executive summary
There is no reporting in the supplied sources that President Joe Biden directly signed presidential orders commanding the arrests of protesters during his term; mass arrests referenced in the sources were carried out by local campus police, municipal law enforcement or as actions by university administrators, even as the president publicly urged “order” and condemned violence [1] [2] [3]. Official lists of Biden’s executive orders and memoranda document many directives across policy areas but do not show a presidential practice of issuing commands that instruct local police to arrest demonstrators on campus or at campaign offices [4] [5] [6].
1. What the claim would mean legally and practically
A presidential “order to arrest protesters” would imply an affirmative federal directive—via an executive order, memorandum, or a federal law-enforcement deployment—directing arrests rather than local authorities acting under state or institutional authority; the executive-action records compiled for Biden document many executive orders and memoranda on governance topics but do not identify any orders instructing arrests of domestic protesters [4] [5] [6].
2. What actually happened on campuses and at campaign sites
In the episodes widely cited in the supplied reporting, large numbers of arrests—hundreds at Columbia and UCLA and thousands across multiple campuses over a span of weeks—were made by campus or municipal police after universities moved to clear encampments or police entered buildings; news organizations described police actions and university decisions as the proximate cause of arrests, not a White House arrest directive [2] [7] [1]. Similarly, a specific incident in Wilmington in which 21 Sunrise Movement activists were arrested at Biden campaign headquarters was reported as an arrest at a campaign site, not a presidentially commanded federal arrest operation [3].
3. What Biden said and how critics interpreted it
President Biden publicly framed the situation as a balance between protecting free speech and preventing disorder, saying “order must prevail” and condemning violence and antisemitism while defending peaceful protest—remarks the White House and press reports characterized as urging campus administrators and police to enforce rules, with spokespeople saying decisions about calling police are up to colleges and universities [1] [8]. Critics on both sides interpreted that rhetoric differently: some argued his law-and-order emphasis encouraged tighter enforcement, while others said his comments were measured and left operational choices to local authorities [9] [7].
4. What the federal record and executive orders show
Public federal repositories and compilations list the many executive orders, memoranda and proclamations President Biden signed on topics from climate to immigration and public health, but these sources catalog administrative governance actions and do not document a pattern of executive orders ordering local law enforcement to arrest protesters [4] [5] [6]. The supplied sources do not contain an example of a numbered executive order or memorandum that directly authorized or commanded mass arrests of demonstrators.
5. Scale of arrests and who carried them out
Reporting cites that more than 2,000 arrests occurred across college campuses in a short period and that individual campuses and city police conducted large sweeps—figures and operational descriptions attributed to university police and local law-enforcement actions, rather than to an explicit White House law-enforcement order [10] [2] [11]. Where federal actors were involved in any capacity is not documented in these supplied sources.
6. Conclusion and limits of this review
Based on the supplied reporting, the factual record shows that large numbers of protesters were arrested during Biden’s term in episodes tied to campus encampments and to arrests at a campaign office, but the arrests are reported as actions by local police or university authorities and not as executions of presidential arrest orders; the supplied executive-order summaries show many presidential directives on policy but do not contain evidence of presidential orders for arrests [3] [2] [4] [6]. The sources provided do not address every possible instance of federal law-enforcement deployment or internal Justice Department authorizations, so if there were narrow or classified federal actions outside mainstream reporting, those are not covered here and cannot be verified from the material supplied.