The Trump administration is suing UCLA, alleging an antisemitic environment
The Trump administration on Tuesday sued the University of California alleging that UCLA was “willfully indifferent” to harassment of Jewish students, marking the third federal lawsuit against the UC system this year and a sharp escalation of civil rights pressure on the nation’s largest public research university.
The 53-page complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California, alleges that UCLA violated the state’s civil rights by tolerating hostile behavior toward Jewish and Israeli students after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas in Israel. The attack triggered Israel’s war on Gaza, which drew widespread student and pro-Palestinian protests in the spring, including at UCLA, which was the site of a violent riot on the night of April 30, 2024.
The government is asking the court to compel UCLA to return state grants going back more than two years — potentially hundreds of millions of dollars — bar it from new federal contracts until it is deemed in compliance with civil rights law, and install an independent court-appointed monitor to oversee its human rights practices. The department is also asking the court to force changes to UCLA’s anti-discrimination procedures.
The demands are far less than the wide-ranging changes to campus policies and culture that the Trump administration sought from UCLA last August, when it unsuccessfully proposed that the university pay nearly $1.2 billion to settle allegations of human rights abuses.
The lawsuit focuses on the camp, saying masked protesters “slapped Jews, beat Jews with sticks, and pepper-sprayed Jews.” The Trump administration said UCLA leaders “took serious action” until May 2, 2024, when police removed the camp.
Official documents also say campus leaders failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students this year. To make this case, court documents cite rallies held by Students for Justice for Palestinian groups, which are banned as official UCLA organizations but have continued to hold unauthorized protests on campus. This group includes Jewish members and supporters.
“Earlier this year, we sued UCLA for subjecting its Jewish and Israeli employees to a hostile work environment,” Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, head of the human rights division at the Ministry of Justice, in a statement. “Now, the Department of Justice is calling UCLA to account for its tolerance of an educational environment that is equally hostile to its Jewish and Israeli students.”
A UC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
How UCLA responded
The university has spoken out against the state’s previous accusations, saying it opposes anti-Semitism and will defend its actions regarding its handling of climate issues on campus.
In February, when the Department of Justice sued UC over the alleged climate of employee disengagement, UCLA Vice Chancellor for Strategic Communications Mary Osako said the university stood “firmly by the decisive steps we have taken to combat antisemitism in all its forms” and would “vigorously defend” its commitment to a safe, inclusive environment.
“As Chancellor [Julio] “Frenk made it clear: Antisemitism is abhorrent and has no place at UCLA or anywhere else,” Osako said at the time.
The Justice Department filed its request on the morning of the same day that Frenk gave his first annual “state of the campus” speech. The councilor did not mention the court case in his speech. But he said UCLA is focused on fighting antisemitism and “all forms of hatred and bigotry.” Frenk said that UCLA, during the administration that began in January, was focused on taking “good intentions with certain actions.”
“We hired a vice chancellor for campus and public safety. We reorganized our Office of Human Rights. We appointed a Title VI officer. And we strengthened our policies to protect both free speech and the safety of all members of our community, while improving disciplinary procedures for those who violate laws and policies,” he said.
Suit cites UCLA’s opposing team
The lawsuit draws several of its allegations from a 2024 report produced by UCLA’s Task Force on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which later faulted UCLA for “widespread anti-Israel bias on campus.”
That group morphed into UCLA’s Initiative to Combat Antisemitism, which produced a report this month that says UCLA has made strides in improving campus culture, including new training and changes to the civil rights appeals process, but there is still more work to be done.
After the campus protests in 2024, UCLA also commissioned a task force dealing with anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism, which found “increased harassment, violence, and targeting” of those groups since 2024 and proposed changes to police policies and protests on campus that it said unfairly targeted the voice of the Palestinian people. The Justice Department’s case does not address those issues.
The new legal filing adds to a growing list of Justice Department actions against UC this year.
In January, the Trump administration joined a lawsuit accusing UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine of using “procedural discrimination” in admissions that rewards black and Latino applicants over whites and Asian Americans, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and a 2023 Supreme Court ruling banning affirmative action based on race.
In February, the Department of Justice sued UC saying that UCLA administrators “repeatedly ignored” and “failed to report” employee complaints of misconduct, citing what the department called a “severe and pervasive” workplace problem since the start of the 2023 Israel-Hamas war.
The Justice Department also recently expanded its civil rights scrutiny of public medical schools beyond UCLA. In March, the department opened an investigation into whether UC San Diego and Stanford engaged in racial discrimination in medical school admissions, seeking seven years of applicant information and putting hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding at risk. Both schools said they comply with state and federal anti-discrimination laws.
