The Trump administration on Tuesday sued the University of California alleging that UCLA is “deliberately indifferent” to antisemitic harassment of Jewish students, marking the government’s third lawsuit against the UC system this year and a sharp escalation of federal civil rights pressure on the nation’s largest public research university.
The 53-page complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, alleges UCLA violated federal civil rights by tolerating a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. The attack prompted Israel’s war in Gaza, which drew widespread student protests and pro-Palestinian encampments that spring, including one at UCLA that was the site of a violent melee the night of April 30 2024.
The government is asking the court to force UCLA repay federal grant money going back more than two years — potentially hundreds of millions of dollars — bar it from new federal contracts until it’s deemed in compliance with civil rights law, and install an independent court-appointed monitor that would oversee its civil rights practices. The department is also asking for the court to force reforms to UCLA’s antidiscrimination procedures.
The demands are much narrower than the wide-reaching changes to campus policies and culture the Trump administration sought from of UCLA last August, when it unsuccessfully proposed the university pay roughly $1.2 billion to settle allegations of civil rights violations.
The suit centers on the encampment, alleging masked demonstrators “kicked and slapped Jews, beat Jews with sticks, and assaulted Jews with pepper spray.” The Trump administration said UCLA leaders took “took no serious action whatsoever” until May 2, 2024, when police cleared the camp.
The legal filing also alleges that campus leaders have failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students up through this year. To make the case, court documents cite rallies held by Students for Justice in Palestine groups, which are banned as formal UCLA organizations but have continued to hold unauthorized protests on campus. The group includes members and supporters who are Jewish.
“Earlier this year, we sued UCLA for subjecting its Jewish and Israeli employees to an antisemitic hostile work environment,” Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement. “Now, the Department of Justice calls UCLA to account for its toleration of the equally appalling hostile educational environment against its Jewish and Israeli students.”
A spokesperson for UC did not respond to a request for comment.
How UCLA has responded
The university has spoken out against previous federal allegations, saying it opposes antisemitism and will defend its actions on how it handles its campus climate issues.
In February, when the Justice Department sued UC over an alleged antisemitic workplace climate for employees, UCLA Vice Chancellor for Strategic Communications Mary Osako said the university stood “firmly by the decisive actions 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 has made clear: Antisemitism is abhorrent and has no place at UCLA or anywhere,” Osako said at the time.
The Justice Department filed its suit the same morning that Frenk gave his first “state of campus” annual address. The chancellor did not mention the court case in his speech. But he said UCLA was focused on combating antisemitism and “all forms of hatred and bigotry.” Frenk said UCLA, during his tenure that began in January, has been focused on replacing “good intentions with specific actions.”
“We recruited an associate vice chancellor for campus and community safety. We reorganized our Civil Rights Office. We appointed a Title VI officer. And we strengthened our policies to protect both free expression and the safety of every member of our community, while enhancing disciplinary processes for those who violate laws and policies,” he said.
Suit cites UCLA’s antisemitism task force
The suit draws several of its allegations from a 2024 report produced by UCLA’s former Task Force on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which late that fall faulted UCLA for “broad-based perceptions of antisemitic and anti-Israeli bias on campus.”
That group transformed into UCLA’s Initiative to Combat Antisemitism, which produced a report this month saying UCLA has made strides in improving campus culture, including new training and reforms to the civil rights complaint system, while still having more work to do.
In the wake of campus protests in 2024, UCLA also commissioned a task force on anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism, which found “increased harassment, violence, and targeting” of those groups since 2024 and suggested reforms to policing and protest rules on campus that it said unfairly targeted pro-Palestinian voices. The Justice Department’s lawsuit does not address those concerns.
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 alleging UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine used a “systemically racist approach” to admissions that privileged Black and Latino applicants over white and Asian American ones, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and the 2023 Supreme Court ruling barring race-based affirmative action.
In February, the Justice Department sued UC alleging UCLA administrators “routinely ignored” and “failed to report” employee complaints of antisemitism, citing what the department called a “severe and pervasive” workplace problem dating to the 2023 onset of the Israel-Hamas war.
The Justice Department has also recently widened its civil rights scrutiny of the state’s medical schools beyond UCLA. In March, the department division opened investigations into whether UC San Diego and Stanford racially discrimination in medical school admissions, demanding seven years of applicant data and putting hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding potentially at risk. Both schools have said they comply with state and federal antidiscrimination laws.
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