A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a bullhorn during a protest at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on March 11, 2025. Photo: Daniel Cole via Reuters Connect

The US Department of Justice on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) over its alleged failure to address a wave of antisemitic incidents of harassment and discrimination on campus which followed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel.

The lawsuit continues the Trump administration’s policy of seeking fines and other penalties against universities accused of refusing to stop their students and faculty from abusing Jews and violating anti-discrimination policies during anti-Israel protests, lone-wolf incidents of hate, and other disturbing acts.

UCLA, along with Columbia University and Princeton University, has felt the point of the executive branch’s bayonet before. Last summer, the administration confiscated some $250 million in federal grants from UCLA over campus antisemitism.

At the time, the Justice Department described antisemitic incidents at the school as “disgusting” and so common across every level of the institution — including the administration and faculty — as to be “systemic.” It later followed up that action with a federal lawsuit in February, alleging antisemitic discrimination against Jewish employees.

The government’s second complaint in just four months signals that US President Donald Trump’s negative opinion of UCLA remains despite the university’s having agreed last year to create new antisemitism initiatives to fulfill the conditions of a settlement reached to resolve a previous civil complaint.

“Earlier this year, we sued UCLA for subjecting its Jewish and Israeli employees to an antisemitic hostile work environment,” assistant US attorney general Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement. “Now, the Department of Justice calls UCLA to account for its toleration of the equally appalling hostile educational environment against its Jewish and Israeli students.”

Previous legal complaints excoriated UCLA’s handling of a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that an anti-Zionist student group erected on campus in the final weeks of the 2024 spring semester, explaining that it was a source of antisemitism from the moment it went up. According to the complaint, students there chanted “death to the Jews,” set up illegal checkpoints through which no one could pass unless they denounced Israel, and ordered campus security assigned there by the university to ensure that no Jews entered it.

UCLA allegedly refused to clear the encampment despite knowing what was happening there and in doing so allowed what was described as a “Jewish Exclusion Zone” on its property.

The problem began long before then, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.

Just five days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, anti-Zionist protesters chanted “Itbah El Yahud” at Bruin Plaza, which means “slaughter the Jews” in Arabic. Other incidents included someone’s tearing a chapter page out of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, titled “Loudmouth Jew,” and leaving it outside the home of a UCLA faculty member, as well as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) staging a disturbing demonstration in which its members cudgeled a piñata, to which a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face was glued, while shouting “beat the Jew.”

On Tuesday, UCLA said the Trump administration mischaracterized its policies and intentions.

“Let me be direct,” said chancellor Julio Frenk. “The suggestion that UCLA has been passive in the face of antisemitism is simply wrong. Combating antisemitism is a moral imperative — one rooted, for me, in personal history that makes indifference unthinkable. In the past year alone, we’ve taken numerous concrete actions to combat antisemitism. We recruited an associate vice chancellor for campus and community safety.”

He continued, “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.”

UCLA agreed last July to pay $6.45 million to settle a lawsuit which accused it of fostering a discriminatory and antisemitic learning environment during the 2023-2024 academic year.

The sum included $2.33 million in donations for a consortium of Jewish civil rights organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Academic Engagement Network (AEN), and UCLA’s Hillel International campus chapter; another $320,000 to be awarded to the UCLA Initiative to Combat Antisemitism. The accusers — Yitzchok Frankel, Joshua Ghayoum, and Eden Shemuelian, who were UCLA students at the time of filing, as well as UCLA Health Dr. Kamran Shamsa — split the remaining $3.6 million.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.