(LOS ANGELES) – Nine students were arrested Thursday after leading a protest inside the University of California Board of Regents meeting and refusing to exit the room when police officers tried to remove them.

The student protesters — who were from UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Cruz — attended the regents meeting at UCLA as representatives of “Fiat Pax,” which defines itself as a coalition aiming to “demilitarize the UC” and whose membership includes University of California students, faculty and staff opposed to the UC’s management of nuclear laboratories.

The UC currently manages two nuclear labs: the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The UC has managed Los Alamos, the lab responsible for the nuclear bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima, since its inception in 1943. The Department of Energy recently opened the management of the lab up for a bid process due to security problems at the facility, but after a lengthy process it remained in the UC’s hands.

The UC is currently bidding for continued management of Livermore.

The regents meeting came to a halt when students in the audience began clapping and Darwin BondGraham, a UC Santa Barbara graduate student, announced that the meeting was being disrupted in order to prevent the regents from discussing the status of these labs.

Among chants of “UC, nuclear free,” regents evacuated the room and police officers were called in to remove the students.

“There is a lot of misunderstanding on this board about what these labs do,” BondGraham yelled above the chants. “We demand severance and withdrawal from the laboratories.”

When told they had to leave the room, the students sat down on the floor and continued chanting. In order to remove the students, UCPD officers handcuffed them and dragged them from the room.

The students were held in custody for an hour and a half before being released.

“(This protest) may not have been effective in changing the regents’ minds, but our last option is to make a serious visual impact,” said Carleigh O’Donnel, a third-year global studies student at UC Santa Barbara who came to support the coalition.

Other protesters agreed the only way to gain the regents’ attention was to take drastic measures, since they were cut off during the morning’s public comment period. Members of the public are given a minute to speak, in accordance with regents’ meetings guidelines.

“Our main goal was to disrupt the meeting,” said Ben Sellers, a third-year UC Santa Cruz music student. “We’re the students. We should decide if we should be involved in the university’s association with nuclear laboratories.”