The Trump administration is pursuing a $1 billion settlement from the University of California, Los Angeles, following federal accusations that the school fostered a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students in violation of civil rights laws, a White House official said Friday.
The move comes just weeks after the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division determined that UCLA had violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by “acting with deliberate indifference” toward antisemitic harassment on campus. Federal officials say the alleged misconduct created a climate that denied Jewish and Israeli students equal access to education.
UCLA becomes the first public university to face such a high-stakes financial demand under the Trump administration, which has already frozen or paused hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to private colleges accused of similar civil rights violations involving antisemitism and affirmative action. The university said this week that the administration had suspended $584 million in federal research grants.
The Justice Department’s findings followed a series of high-profile protests in 2024, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators were accused of blocking Jewish students’ access to classes and campus facilities. Last month, UCLA agreed to a $6 million settlement with three Jewish students and a Jewish professor who had sued over the incidents. As part of that agreement, the university pledged $2.3 million to eight organizations that combat antisemitism, established an Office of Campus and Community Safety, and implemented new rules for managing campus demonstrations.
UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk—whose family history includes Jewish relatives fleeing Nazi Germany—also launched an initiative to address antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias.
UC President James B. Milliken said Friday that the administration’s $1 billion demand would “completely devastate” the university system and harm students across California. “As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources, and a payment of this scale would inflict great harm on our students and our state,” he said, adding that UCLA had offered to engage in “good faith dialogue” with federal officials.
The White House did not detail additional conditions for settlement, but officials indicated that the UCLA case could follow the model of last month’s $200 million settlement with Columbia University, which also restored more than $400 million in research grants. That agreement is now viewed by the administration as a template for financial penalties in other high-profile cases.
