A judge on Friday ordered the federal agency to end a “blanket policy that denies any future funding” to UCLA, further ruling that the Trump administration cannot seek payments from any UC campus under Title VI or Title IX of federal law “in connection with any civil rights investigation.”
The ruling also prohibits the Department of Justice and federal funding agencies from withholding funds “or threatening to do so to coerce the University of California in a manner that violates the First or Tenth Amendments.” All told, if not overturned on appeal, the order would block the administration’s attempt to pressure UCLA to pay $1.2 billion and make a number of other concessions, including halting the enrollment of “foreign students who may engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or anti-Semitic disruption or harassment” and halting “hormonal interventions and ‘gender reassignment’ surgeries on persons under the age of 18” at its medical school and affiliated hospitals.
On July 29, the administration’s targeting of the University of California system surfaced. At the time, the Justice Department said its months-long investigation across the system had so far concluded that UCLA violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in its response to alleged anti-Semitism at a pro-Palestinian protest camp in spring 2024.
Federal agencies—including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy—quickly began freezing funds; the University of California lost an estimated $584 million. But the UC researchers sued, and even before Friday’s ruling, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California ordered the restoration of nearly all of the frozen funds.
Friday’s ruling comes in a case brought this fall by the American Association of University Professors, the affiliated American Federation of Teachers and other unions. Lin once again served as judge.
“Defendants failed to engage in the notice and hearing procedures required by Title VI to cut off funding for alleged discrimination,” she wrote.
“As each day passes and UCLA continues to be denied the opportunity to receive new funding, [sic] “Intensifying the pressure on the defendants,” she wrote. Many UC faculty and staff have submitted statements describing how the defendants’ actions have chilled rhetoric throughout the UC system. They described how they stopped teaching or researching topics they feared were too “left” or “woke” to avoid triggering further defunding by the defendants. They also gave examples of projects that the University of California stopped out of fear of the same retaliation. These are classic, foreseeable First Amendment harms, and exactly what the defendants stated publicly they intended. “
