Building on a monthslong battle between the Trump administration and the University of California, the Department of Justice filed a suit on Tuesday against the university system, alleging that its Los Angeles campus failed to protect Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff in accordance with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination.  

The 81-page DOJ complaint, filed in California’s Central District, alleges that since the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks in Israel, UCLA “has ignored, and continues to ignore, gross and repeated violations of viewpoint-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions. Jewish and Israeli faculty have been physically threatened, had their classrooms disrupted, and had their workplaces papered with disturbing images.”

“Numerous Jewish and Israeli employees have been forced to take leave, work from home, and even leave their jobs to avoid the hostile work environment,” the suit alleges. 

In a statement to Jewish Insider, Mary Osako, UCLA’s vice chancellor of strategic communications, said the university has “taken concrete and significant steps to strengthen campus safety, enforce policies, and combat antisemitism in a systemic and sustained manner.”

Osako said those efforts have included hiring a Title VI/Title VII officer “to ensure professionalized oversight and accountability” and strengthened time, place, and manner policies “to protect both free expression and campus operations.”  

The federal suit is a significant escalation of the government’s crackdown on what it alleges are failures across the University of California system to address antisemitism. Multiple civil rights investigations have been launched into the system and individual campuses.

The lawsuit comes seven months after UCLA settled a federal lawsuit with Jewish students who alleged that the university permitted antisemitic conduct during the spring 2024 anti-Israel encampments on the campus.

Yitzchok Frankel, then a second-year law student at UCLA, filed suit against the university in June 2024, claiming that he was “harassed and blocked from approaching the encampment by antisemitic activists, all with the assistance of UCLA security.” Two other Jewish UCLA students and a UCLA medical school professor later joined the suit. As part of the settlement, UCLA agreed to provide support to community organizations engaged in combating antisemitism.

Last year, the Trump administration sought more than $1 billion and a range of concessions from the university in order to restore funding frozen over alleged antisemitism, which was never paid — even after some research money was restored. 

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled in November in a preliminary injunction that the Trump administration could not fine the University of California or cut the school system’s federal funding over claims it allows antisemitism or other types of discrimination.  

The government did not offer a specific financial demand of UCLA in Tuesday’s lawsuit, but it suggested “awarding damages” to “aggrieved Jewish and Israeli UCLA employees.”