The Justice Department announced Wednesday that an investigation found that the medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles, violated federal anti-discrimination laws with admissions policies that favored Black and Hispanic applicants with lower qualifications than white and Asian students.
The review stems from a 2023 Supreme Court decision that overturned race-conscious admissions. While many in academia have argued that the decision allowed for schools to consider race in some aspects of the application process, the Trump administration has adopted a narrow interpretation of the ruling.
That discrepancy was on display in the government’s investigation, which pointed to messages exchanged by admissions officials at U.C.L.A. that referred to diversity and “holistic review practices,” a common process aimed at weighing factors such as character or personal growth in addition to test scores and other academic metrics. The Justice Department referred to these approaches as effectively “workarounds to achieve medical school diversity goals.”
The Justice Department also flagged a discussion among admissions officials about improving health care outcomes for Black and Hispanic patients by increasing diversity of the medical work force, saying the findings showed the medical school’s “intent to racially discriminate” and conceal the “true motive to treat certain applicants unfavorably.”
A study published last year by U.C.L.A. doctors, which was based on two decades of research, showed that Black and Hispanic patients treated by doctors of similar race or ethnicity led to increased communication, patient satisfaction, shared decision-making and great adherence to treatment plans. Researchers said the study may help measure clinical outcomes in the future.
The findings on Wednesday were the first time since the Supreme Court case, known as Students for Fair Admissions, that the Justice Department has determined a medical school’s admissions process violated federal bans on racial discrimination. The department said it sought to negotiate a resolution that would bring the school’s admissions policies into legal compliance.
“U.C.L.A.’s admissions process has been focused on racial demographics at the expense of merit and excellence — allowing racial politics to distract the school from the vital work of training great doctors,” said Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, in a statement.
A spokesperson for U.C.L.A.’s David Geffen School of Medicine said that the admissions process is “based on merit and grounded in a rigorous, comprehensive review of each applicant” and that U.C.L.A. was “confident in our practices and our mission to maintain access to a high-quality education to all qualified students.”
The medical school remained “committed to providing equal opportunity to all applicants and fully complying with federal and state laws,” according to the statement.
Black students accounted for 8.4 percent of medical school applicants accepted nationally in the 2025-26 school year, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, and 10.3 percent of the total medical school enrollment, according to the group. About 14 percent of the nation’s population is Black.
Hispanic people make up about 20 percent of the U.S. population, and about 12.3 percent of all medical students in the country.
Since the Civil Rights Act was first passed by Congress more than six decades ago, universities and college have sought to diversify their student bodies. But what started as a remedy to centuries of systemic exclusion of minorities shifted as school officials viewed diversity as a compelling educational benefit that helped prepare students for an increasingly globalized work force.
Those efforts changed again after the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Rooting out race-conscious admissions for colleges has been a priority for the Trump administration for more than a year. The government sued Harvard University in February seeking more detailed admissions data from the Ivy League school. In March, the Justice Department opened investigations into admissions policies at three major medical schools, Stanford, Ohio State and the University of California, San Diego.
At the University of California, leaders have been on a war footing for more than a year as the Trump administration has targeted each of the system’s 10 campuses with investigations.
Addressing regents on Tuesday, James B. Milliken, the system president, said he felt like he had been “constantly updating the board on new actions by the federal government.”
“The nonstop actions against the University of California and other leading universities continues unabated,” said Mr. Milliken, who said the onslaught had “required tens of millions of dollars in added legal expenses.”
Mr. Milliken warned that the costs were more than financial.
“To call this a distraction seems inadequate to the scale,” Mr. Milliken said, adding that University of California leaders “must continue to defend the integrity and the lifeblood of our institutions.”
The Justice Department and its allies have been agitating over the U.C.L.A. medical school for many months. The department in February joined an advocacy group’s lawsuit challenging admissions practices in Los Angeles. But the department has also targeted U.C.L.A. more broadly, with a separate lawsuit accusing the university of civil rights violations related to antisemitism. Both cases are pending.
Michael C. Bender is a Times correspondent in Washington.
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