The Trump administration withdrew $200 million in federal research funding to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) after a Department of Justice (DOJ) finding Thursday that it had violated the civil rights of Jewish students.
As Breitbart News reported earlier this week, UCLA settled a lawsuit brought by Jewish students — and was promptly hit with a DOJ finding that it had violated the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act.
Breitbart News reported:
In April 2024, UCLA allowed anti-Israel students to set up an “encampment” in the center of campus. The university surrounded it with metal barricades and allowed activists to patrol the encampment boundary.
The activists barred Jewish students who would not renounce support for Israel from crossing through the space. They also assaulted members of the public, including journalists exercising First Amendment rights.
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Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, sent a lengthy letter to UCLA outlining the findings of a federal investigation of antisemitism at the university.
“The Department has concluded that UCLA’s response to the protest encampment on its campus in the spring of 2024 was deliberately indifferent to a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students in violation of the Equal Protection Clause [of the Fourteenth Amendment] and Title VI [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964],” she wrote. She invited UCLA to begin a voluntary resolution before further legal proceedings.
The Trump administration did not wait for those legal proceedings to begin before acting.
The Daily Bruin reported:
The federal government is suspending research funding to UCLA, according to a Thursday email from Chancellor Julio Frenk.
UCLA received a notice that the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, along with other agencies, are suspending their funding to UCLA, according to the email. The move comes after the United States Department of Justice alleged in a letter to UC President Michael Drake on Tuesday that UCLA had violated federal civil rights law due to its treatment of Jewish and Israeli students during the Palestine solidarity encampment.
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Frenk added in the email that the federal government listed “antisemitism and bias” as reasoning for the defunding. UCLA, he said, shares the goal of “eradicating antisemitism across society.”
UCLA failed to take any action to protect Jewish students — and, in fact, protected the anti-Israel radicals instead — until a mob of vigilantes from Jewish neighborhoods near the campus destroyed the encampment.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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