The University of California, Los Angeles, is asking a judge to dismiss a government lawsuit that said the school had abetted antisemitism, and it is accusing the Trump administration of abusing civil rights laws.
The Justice Department has targeted U.C.L.A. for more than a year and at one point demanded more than $1 billion and a suite of policy concessions to settle. The government sued months later, writing in May that U.C.L.A. had violated federal law by taking “no serious action whatsoever” to immediately protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment during campus protests in 2024.
But U.C.L.A. said in a court filing on Wednesday night that the government had ignored the efforts it had made to improve its campus climate. That, U.C.L.A. said, showed that “this lawsuit is not really about ensuring compliance with civil rights laws, but about weaponizing those laws to bring institutions of higher education to heel.”
“This court,” U.C.L.A. added, “should reject this latest attempt to leverage governmental power as a tool for political coercion.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
U.C.L.A.’s fiery language was unusual, as it has typically been measured in its public statements about the Trump administration.
But the filing came after the Trump administration faced setbacks in its push to punish against universities over pro-Palestinian activism on campuses in 2023 and 2024.
In August, for example, a federal judge in Boston threw out an antisemitism case that the government had brought against Harvard University. The judge concluded that Congress had not written the law “to penalize a wayward funding recipient but instead to incentivize it to bring itself into compliance with Title VI.”
That law is part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and it forbids discrimination on the basis of national origin, among other protected characteristics, in programs that receive federal money.
The government has appealed the August ruling. U.C.L.A., however, cited it repeatedly in its filing on Wednesday night and essentially argued that Judge Christina A. Snyder, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, should adopt its reasoning in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
The government has asserted that the university was “deliberately indifferent” to the plights of Jewish and Israeli people. The university rebutted that argument, writing in Wednesday’s filing that its recent responses “to disruptive protest activity have been effectual, not ‘indifferent.’”
The government, U.C.L.A. wrote, was showing a “head-in-the-sand disregard” for the university’s work to curb antisemitism, including changes to protest policies and the creation of a campus and community safety office.
It also rejected the government’s contention that it had grounds to consider U.C.L.A. in breach of contracts that add up to more than $2 billion.
Research funding has been an essential component of the Trump administration’s quest to remake universities it regards as hostile to its ideology. Major research universities like U.C.L.A. have factored that money into their business models for decades, but the Trump administration has routinely sought to strip that funding from schools with which it found fault.
Federal judges have repeatedly rebuffed those efforts.
U.C.L.A. is involved in other legal disputes with the government, including a lawsuit accusing the school of violating the civil rights of some employees.
Beyond U.C.L.A., the federal government is pursuing investigations of, or lawsuits against, every other campus in the University of California system. Last month, for example, it sued over admissions practices at Berkeley’s law school. Berkeley has denied the Justice Department’s claim that the law school engaged in racial discrimination against white and Asian applicants.
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