The University of California, Berkeley, discriminated against white and Asian applicants to its law school, the Justice Department and the Education Department said Wednesday.
The move expands the Trump administration’s effort to enforce its contested interpretation of a three-year-old Supreme Court ruling that struck down race-conscious admissions programs. It also escalates the government’s clash with the University of California system. All 10 of its campuses have come under federal scrutiny.
The Justice Department based its findings, in part, on applicant data provided by the law school, which it said showed that the school had a bias against Asian and white applicants and in favor of Black applicants.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s top civil rights official, wrote in a letter to a lawyer for Berkeley that the patterns “could not reasonably have occurred by chance and provide substantial evidence of intentional discrimination.”
Berkeley fired back soon after the Justice Department released Ms. Dhillon’s letter.
“Berkeley is committed to ensuring that every student is admitted based on their merit, and not on their race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin,” the university said in a statement, adding that it would “spare no effort to provide ample evidence showing that the university complies with all relevant laws, policies and rules governing admissions.”
The administration’s approach to college admissions stems most directly from a Supreme Court ruling in 2023, in which Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority that applicants must be treated as individuals and “not on the basis of race.”
But he also said the ruling should be not “construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.”
During President Trump’s second term, the Justice Department has contended that the court had forbidden any consideration of race in admissions processes. It has argued that some of the factors that colleges might use to boost students’ applications, such as being a recipient of the need-based Pell grant, were being used as proxies for race.
In the case of Berkeley, according to the Justice Department, the law school had used “race, essay prompts and other tactics to further its admissions diversity goals.” The result, the government contended, was that Black applicants were far more likely to be admitted to Berkeley’s law school than white or Asian applicants with comparable qualifications.
In a statement, Ms. Dhillon said Berkeley had shown “a complete disregard for the rule of law.”
Although the government has demonstrated some interest in undergraduate admissions procedures — it has a pending investigation, for instance, at Yale — the Justice Department’s formal accusations have so far focused on law or medical schools.
The University of California system has been a persistent target: The Justice Department has already accused the medical schools at the Davis, Los Angeles and San Diego campuses of wrongdoing in admissions.
Those accusations flow from the web of investigations that the Justice Department has pursued against U.C. campuses for almost all of Mr. Trump’s second term. The agency assigned a special group to investigate the university system and last year sought more than $1 billion to settle antisemitism claims at U.C.L.A.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Education Department have also been examining California campuses.
An Education Department inquiry into Berkeley provoked a campus furor last year, after university officials gave the Trump administration names of students and employees who were tied to complaints about antisemitism.
Leaders at Berkeley sought to distance themselves from the move, which a campus lawyer wrote at the time that it was in response to “directions” from system officials. But the Berkeley chancellor, Richard K. Lyons, faced enormous backlash on the campus, where many people argued that the university had capitulated to pressure from the government.
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