The Trump administration sued the University of California on Tuesday, accusing its Los Angeles campus of endemic antisemitism that compromised the civil rights of Jewish employees.
Filed nearly seven months after the Justice Department sought a range of policy concessions and more than $1 billion from the university, the lawsuit represented a significant escalation in the long-running dispute between the Trump administration and one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university systems.
The 81-page lawsuit, brought in Federal District Court in Los Angeles, accused U.C.L.A.’s administration of having “turned a blind eye to — and at times facilitated — grossly antisemitic acts and systematically ignored cries for help from its own terrified Jewish and Israeli employees.”
The university system referred a request for comment to U.C.L.A.
In a statement, Mary Osako, a U.C.L.A. vice chancellor, condemned bigotry and said the university had “taken concrete and significant steps to strengthen campus safety, enforce policies and combat antisemitism in a systemic and sustained manner.”
“We stand firmly by the decisive actions we have taken to combat antisemitism in all its forms, and we will vigorously defend our efforts and our unwavering commitment to providing a safe, inclusive environment for all members of our community,” Ms. Osako said.
The government announced the lawsuit hours before President Trump’s State of the Union address and after months of relative calm in the dispute between the university and the government, underscoring the unpredictable nature of the Trump administration’s campaign to reshape American higher education.
Since Mr. Trump returned to the White House last year, his administration has wielded litigation, funding cuts, investigations and settlement demands to try to gain compliance from American universities, which have long guarded their academic independence and have sometimes objected to Mr. Trump’s tactics.
The University of California — a 10-campus juggernaut in the country’s most populous Democratic state — has been one of the Trump administration’s prime targets. Last year, in a sharp break from the Justice Department’s norms, civil rights lawyers were given a list of colleges to investigate, including the University of California.
Lawyers assigned to that inquiry last year, The New York Times previously reported, were initially given one month to show that antisemitism was pervasive in the U.C. system.
The inquiry lasted longer, and the administration has unleashed a series of attacks focused on U.C.L.A., even as it has pursued investigations involving all of the university system’s campuses.
Last July, on the same day U.C.L.A. settled a federal lawsuit involving Jewish students who said they had been discriminated against, the Justice Department sent the school a notice that accused it of having been “deliberately indifferent to the hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students.”
Soon after, the Trump administration proposed a settlement that included a $1 billion fine — a sum that Mr. Trump personally insisted on. The Justice Department also demanded $172 million for a claims fund for people who had experienced antisemitism and policy changes that would bring U.C.L.A. into closer ideological alignment with the White House.
Talks between the government and the university sputtered, and in November, a federal judge in San Francisco sharply limited the ability of the Trump administration to use one of its favored tools — cuts to research funding — as a means of coercion.
The Justice Department has not brought a lawsuit related to its July claims about U.C.L.A. students, even though a government-imposed deadline for a settlement lapsed in September.
Tuesday’s lawsuit focused on the civil rights of U.C.L.A. employees and cited complaints of discrimination filed by Ian Holloway, a professor in the nursing school, and Kamran Shamsa, a cardiologist. Both told the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that they had been subjected to hostile work environments.
The government’s lawsuit on Tuesday did not make a specific financial demand of U.C.L.A., but it proposed “awarding damages” to “aggrieved Jewish and Israeli U.C.L.A. employees,” as well as Dr. Holloway and Dr. Shamsa.
“The litany of vile acts of antisemitism that allegedly took place, and continue to take place, at U.C.L.A. are, if found to be true, a mark of shame against the University of California,” Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who oversees civil rights cases for the Trump administration, said in a statement. “The Justice Department will ensure that U.C.L.A. maintains an environment for its employees free from antisemitic harassment.”
The Trump administration has sometimes turned to the courts to challenge universities. Earlier this month, for example, the Justice Department sued Harvard University for access to the school’s admissions records. And the E.E.O.C. is embroiled in litigation against the University of Pennsylvania over a subpoena for information about Jewish employees.
Both of those cases are pending. After Tuesday’s lawsuit involving U.C.L.A., Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, criticized the government for regularly using “antisemitism to pressure and reshape higher education institutions toward a far-right agenda.”
Mr. Wolfson’s organization was among the labor groups that sued last year to curb the Trump administration’s attacks on the California system. “Civil rights enforcement should protect people from discrimination,” he said, “without becoming a vehicle for political overreach.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
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