DOJ sues UCLA over antisemitism, seeks grant clawback

On May 26, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a 54-page complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, naming the UC Board of Regents as defendant. The suit alleges the university violated of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students from a hostile educational environment at UCLA.

was enacted as part of the Civil Rights Act that President Lyndon Johnson signed on July 2, 1964. Congress designed it to condition federal financial assistance on nondiscrimination by race, color, and national origin. Courts have since extended Title VI protections to cover shared ethnic and ancestral characteristics, including Jewish identity. The DOJ Civil Rights Division has brought Title VI enforcement actions against universities before, but prior cases focused on prospective compliance orders and funding termination, not retroactive repayment of grants already disbursed.

The DOJ complaint focuses heavily on the pro-Palestinian encampment that UC Divest coalition groups erected outside Royce Hall on April 25, 2024, and that police cleared on May 2, 2024, with more than 200 arrests. According to the complaint, masked demonstrators built plywood barriers, barricaded Royce Hall and Powell Library doors with garbage cans and bicycle racks, and formed human phalanxes to block Jewish and Israeli students from entering academic buildings.

The complaint further alleges that protesters slapped, kicked, beat Jewish and Israeli students with sticks, doused them with pepper spray, and knocked at least one student unconscious. That student was hospitalized with an open head wound. Graffiti reading "F*** ALL Jews" was painted on a building during the encampment. UCLA administrators declared the encampment illegal on April 30 but did not call law enforcement until May 2.

UCLA's Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion received more than 100 complaints about antisemitism and anti-Israeli harassment between October 7, 2023, and the filing of this lawsuit, according to the DOJ. The complaint alleges the office routinely ignored those complaints. Not one was properly resolved before the DOJ notified UCLA it was conducting its own investigation.

This allegation tracks a pattern the February 2026 lawsuit described for employee complaints: not a single civil rights complaint filed by Jewish or Israeli employees after October 7, 2023, was properly investigated until DOJ formally intervened in March 2025. Both lawsuits cite the same EDI office as the channel through which complaints moved and stalled.

The DOJ is seeking two categories of relief. First, it wants a court order permanently enjoining UCLA from discriminating against or harassing Jewish and Israeli students. Second, it wants the court to order UCLA to repay all federal grants received during the period of alleged Title VI noncompliance.

UCLA reported $1.52 billion in total sponsored-research expenditures in fiscal year 2024-25, with 56 percent, roughly $855 million, coming from federal sources. NIH alone provided UCLA more than $500 million in grants in 2024. The grant-clawback demand does not specify a dollar amount, leaving the potential liability open-ended. An earlier attempt by the Trump administration to freeze $584 million in UCLA research grants was blocked by a federal judge, and a separate $1.2 billion settlement demand was also blocked in court. No Title VI case has previously resulted in full retroactive grant repayment at this scale.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche oversees the DOJ that filed this lawsuit. Blanche, who served as Donald Trump's personal defense attorney during his 2024 criminal trials, became acting attorney general in April 2026 after Trump removed Pam Bondi. Bondi had overseen the first DOJ lawsuit against the UC system, filed February 24, 2026, under Title VII.

Leo Terrell, senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights and chair of the DOJ's Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, is the primary architect of the university lawsuit strategy. Terrell told Fox News: "We are suing every one of these universities guilty of antisemitism. Under Title VI, we're taking away their money. We're going to bankrupt these universities." The DOJ has also sued Harvard University for antisemitism and sent Title VI investigation notices to 60 universities.

UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk pushed back against the complaint, saying "the suggestion that UCLA has been passive in the face of antisemitism is simply wrong" and that "combating antisemitism is a moral imperative."

Frenk listed concrete steps UCLA has taken since the 2024 encampment: recruiting an associate vice chancellor for campus and community safety, reorganizing its Civil Rights Office, appointing a dedicated Title VI officer, and releasing an Initiative to Combat Antisemitism report on May 14, 2026. UC President James Milliken, who took office in August 2025, controls the system's legal and financial response on behalf of the Board of Regents.

A December 2025 ProPublica investigation, conducted jointly with The Chronicle of Higher Education, found that DOJ career lawyers warned that the antisemitism case against UCLA was legally shaky. According to the investigation, political appointees pressured career lawyers to find evidence backing a predetermined conclusion. Several career attorneys left the department over the investigation, describing the case as fraudulent and a sham.

DOJ officials had at one point sought more than $1 billion in fines from UCLA, until a federal judge blocked that demand. The administration also sought $172 million for employees who had complained of antisemitism discrimination, even though only a handful had filed EEOC complaints and statutory caps limit individual awards to $300,000.

The lawsuit sits at the intersection of two unsettled legal questions. The first is how far the standard extends: whether a university that responds too slowly to peer-on-peer harassment, even if it eventually acts, can be liable under Title VI. The Supreme Court set this standard in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education (1999), holding institutions liable when their response is clearly unreasonable in light of known circumstances.

The second question is how courts will distinguish unlawful harassment from constitutionally protected political protest under the . The AAUP and ACLU have filed briefs in related cases arguing the administration's antisemitism enforcement campaign conflates anti-Zionist political speech with racially discriminatory conduct.

In Alexander v. Sandoval (2001), the Supreme Court held that Title VI does not give private individuals the right to sue over disparate-impact discrimination. Only the government can bring disparate-impact enforcement actions under Title VI. That ruling shifted enforcement power toward federal agencies and the DOJ Civil Rights Division, making the DOJ the primary check on institutional noncompliance. The UCLA lawsuit's theory of retroactive grant repayment, if accepted by a court, would significantly expand the practical leverage federal enforcers hold over any institution that accepts federal funding.

Mark Rosenbaum, senior counsel at Public Counsel, previously won a court order blocking the Trump administration's attempt to freeze $584 million in UCLA research grants. His office is expected to challenge the legal basis for the grant-clawback demand, arguing Title VI does not authorize retroactive repayment of grants already disbursed. U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner, who blocked the earlier $584 million freeze, is the judge likely to hear this new lawsuit and rule on the repayment demand.