The Trump administration on Tuesday filed its second antisemitism lawsuit against the University of California, Los Angeles in four months.
The lawsuit accused the school of taking “no serious action whatsoever” to prevent the harassment of Jewish and Israeli students during pro-Palestinian protests in 2024.
In February, the administration sued U.C.L.A. over similar allegations that it ignored antisemitic harassment toward the university’s Jewish employees; that lawsuit cited the same protests as the administration’s latest litigation.
“Universities have an obligation to maintain safe and inclusive campuses for all students,” said the first assistant U.S. attorney on the case, Bill Essayli, in a statement. “Universities that violate our nation’s civil rights laws by repeatedly failing to shield Jewish students from antisemitism will be held accountable.”
Both suits against U.C.L.A. draw on the work of the university’s own task force, which investigated the rise of antisemitism on campus, and produced a lengthy report in 2024. In a similar lawsuit against Harvard University in March, the Department of Justice repeatedly cited the findings of Harvard’s internal antisemitism task force.
A spokesman for U.C.L.A. did not immediately return a request for comment Tuesday afternoon. Leaders for the school have in the past denounced antisemitism, and earlier this month the university announced a series of actions meant to combat antisemitism and protect Jewish students on campus.
The government’s latest lawsuit accuses U.C.L.A. of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids discrimination based on race or national origin in schools receiving federal money. The earlier lawsuit, from February, accuses the university of violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which forbids discrimination in employment.
The litigation follows a demand last year that U.C.L.A. pay a $1 billion fine, among other concessions, to restore cuts to research funding.
The new lawsuit asks a court to rule that the university has been in violation of the law since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and “triggered a wave of antisemitism and anti-Israeli sentiment across American college campuses, including at U.C.L.A.,” the suit says. It also asks the court to rule that the federal government does not need to make any more scheduled grant payments to U.C.L.A., and that grant payments made while U.C.L.A. was in violation of the law be returned to the government.
Mark Arsenault covers higher education for The Times.
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