The Trump administration accuses UCLA of standing by while Jewish and Israeli students were barred from parts of the campus unless they denounced Israel.
LOS ANGELES (CN) – The US Department of Justice on Tuesday filed a second lawsuit against the Regents of the University of California over its handling of anti-Israel protests on the UCLA campus during the Gaza war.
While the Trump administration accused university in a February lawsuit alleging violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by failing to prevent harassment of its Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff, in the new complaintThe Justice Department alleges that UC violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by tolerating the harassment and exclusion of Jewish and Israeli students.
“Universities have an obligation to maintain safe and inclusive campuses for all students,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said in a statement. “Universities that violate our nation’s civil rights laws by repeatedly failing to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism will be held accountable.”
Claims that pro-Palestinian protesters expelled Jewish students from parts of campus reflect that bring by UCLA students in 2024.
Their claims related to an encampment that protesters had set up in Royce Quad — at the heart of the sprawling Westwood campus — where activists set up a “Jewish exclusion zone” with checkpoints where students had to denounce Israel as a genocidal state illegally occupying Palestine if they wanted to pass.
“Even though UCLA knew that its Jewish and Israeli students risked physical attack when they tried to go to class or the library, UCLA inexplicably took no serious action **until May 2, 2024, when he finally allowed police to clear the camp,” the Justice Department says in the complaint.
Protests erupted on college campuses across the US and around the world when Israel, in retaliation for Hamas attacks that killed 1,200 people on October 7, 2023, launched a two-and-a-half-year assault on Gaza that ended up killing up to 72,000 Palestinians.
The October 7 attacks and Israel’s bombing and occupation of Gaza also caused an increase in anti-Semitic reports incidents in many countries.
On October 16, 2024, REPORTUCLA’s task force created to combat anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias on campus found that “campus officials continued to refuse to disrupt the campus even after protesters denied Jews and others free passage and access to classrooms and campus facilities on the grounds that allowing such behavior and activities was part of their ‘de-escalation strategy.'”
UCLA administrators, according to the task force, were reluctant to take action against those at the camp unless violence erupted. While the chief of the UCLA Police Department had advised campus leadership from the beginning not to allow the campus because it violated campus rules against overnight camping and he feared it could lead to problems, university leadership decided to allow it “as an expression of students’ First Amendment rights,” the task force said in the report.
“Let me be blunt: the suggestion that UCLA has been passive in the face of anti-Semitism is simply wrong,” Chancellor Julio Frenk said in response to the new lawsuit. “Fighting anti-Semitism is a moral imperative – rooted, for me, in personal history that makes indifference unthinkable.”
Frenk pointed to what he said were numerous concrete actions taken last year alone to combat anti-Semitism, including the hiring of an associate vice chancellor for campus and community safety, the reorganization of UCLA’s Office of Civil Rights and the appointment of a Title VI officer.
The Justice Department accuses the UC Regents of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin, and of breach of contract for violating the terms of federal grants the university receives insofar as they require the university to comply with Title VI.
The government seeks a permanent injunction to ensure that UCLA will not allow harassment and discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students. The Justice Department is also asking the court to rescind and return all grant payments made to UCLA during the time the university was in noncompliance with Title VI.
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