The Trump administration sued the University of California on Tuesday, alleging UCLA is “deliberately indifferent” to anti-Semitic harassment of Jewish students, marking the government’s third lawsuit against the UC system this year and a sharp increase in federal civil rights pressure on the nation’s largest public research university.
The 53-page complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, alleges that UCLA has violated federal civil rights by tolerating a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. The attack prompted Israel’s war in Gaza, which attracted massive student protests and pro-Palestinian camps that spring, including UCLA, which was the site of violent melee on the night of April 30, 2024.
The government is asking the court to force UCLA to repay federal grant money owed more than two years — potentially hundreds of millions of dollars — until it is deemed to be in compliance with civil rights law, bar it from new federal contracts, and install an independent court-appointed monitor who will oversee its civil rights practices. The department is also asking the court to force UCLA to reform its anti-discrimination procedures.
The demands are much narrower than the sweeping changes in campus policies and culture the Trump administration demanded from UCLA last August, when it unsuccessfully proposed paying the university nearly $1.2 billion to settle allegations of civil rights violations.
The lawsuit focuses on the encampment, alleging that masked protesters “kicked and slapped Jews, beat Jews with sticks, and attacked Jews with pepper spray.” The Trump administration said UCLA leaders “took no serious action” until May 2, 2024, when police evacuated the camp.
The legal filing also alleges that campus leaders have failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students until this year. To make the case, court documents cite rallies organized by Students for Justice in Palestine groups, which are banned as formal UCLA organizations but have continued to hold unauthorized protests on campus. The group includes members and supporters who are Jewish.
“Earlier this year, we sued UCLA for subjecting its Jewish and Israeli employees to an anti-Semitic hostile work environment,” said Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said in a statement. “Now, the Justice Department holds UCLA accountable for tolerating an equally appalling hostile academic environment against its Jewish and Israeli students.”
A UC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
How UCLA has responded
The university has spoken out against previous federal charges, saying it opposes anti-Semitism and will defend its actions on how it handles climate issues on its campus.
In February, when the Justice Department sued UC over an alleged anti-Semitic environment for employees in the workplace, UCLA Vice Chancellor for Strategic Communications Mary Osako said the university “stands firm on the decisive steps it has taken to combat anti-Semitism in all its forms” and would “vigorously defend” its commitment to a safe, inclusive environment.
“As Chancellor (Julio) Frank has made clear: anti-Semitism is abhorrent and has no place at UCLA or anywhere else,” Osako said at the time.
The Justice Department filed its lawsuit the same morning that Frank gave his first “State of the Campus” annual address. The Chancellor did not mention the court case in his speech. But he said UCLA’s focus is on combating anti-Semitism and “all forms of hatred and bigotry.” Frank said UCLA has focused on “transforming good intentions into specific actions” during his tenure, which began in January.
“We recruited an associate vice chancellor for campus and community safety. We reorganized our civil rights office. We appointed a Title VI officer. And we strengthened our policies to protect both free expression and the safety of every member of our community, while enhancing disciplinary processes for those who violate laws and policies.”
Lawsuit cites UCLA’s anti-Semitism task force
The lawsuit takes many of its allegations from a 2024 report prepared by UCLA’s former Task Force on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israel Bias, which later faulted UCLA for “broad-based perceptions of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias on campus.”
That group morphed into UCLA’s Initiative to Combat Antisemitism, which released a report this month saying UCLA has made progress in improving campus culture, including new training and improving the civil rights complaint system, while there is still more work to do.
In the wake of the campus protests in 2024, UCLA also formed a task force on anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism, which found “an increase in harassment, violence, and targeting” of those groups since 2024 and suggested reforming campus policing and protest rules, saying it unfairly targeted pro-Palestinian voices. The Justice Department’s lawsuit does not address those concerns.
The new legal filing adds to a growing list of Justice Department actions against UC this year.
In January, the Trump administration joined a lawsuit alleging that UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine used a “systemically racist approach” to admissions that privileges black and Latino applicants over white and Asian American applicants, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and a 2023 Supreme Court decision barring race-based affirmative action.
In February, the Justice Department sued UC, accusing UCLA administrators of “routinely ignoring” and “failing to report” employee complaints of anti-Semitism, citing what the department called a “serious and widespread” workplace problem linked to the start of the Israel–Hamas war in 2023.
The Justice Department also recently expanded its civil rights investigation of the state’s medical schools beyond UCLA. In March, the Department of Health’s division launched an investigation into whether UC San Diego and Stanford racially discriminated in medical school admissions, demanding seven years of applicants’ data and potentially putting millions of dollars in federal research funding at risk. Both schools have said they comply with state and federal anti-discrimination laws.
