Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images: Vladimir Molnar and Rawf8 via Getty Images.
On the morning of Thursday, July 31, James B. Milliken was enjoying a round of golf at the remote Sand Hills club in Western Nebraska when his cellphone buzzed.
Milliken was still days away from taking the helm of the sprawling University of California system, but his new office was on the line with disturbing news: The Trump administration was freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding at the University of California, Los Angeles, UC’s biggest campus. Milliken quickly packed up and made the five-hour drive to Denver to catch the next flight to California.
He landed on the front lines of one of the most confounding cultural battles waged by the Trump administration.
The grant freeze was the latest salvo in the administration’s broader campaign against elite universities, which it has pilloried as purveyors of antisemitism and “woke” indoctrination. Over the next four months, the Justice Department targeted UCLA with its full playbook for bringing colleges to heel, threatening it with multiple discrimination lawsuits, demanding more than $1 billion in fines and pressing for a raft of changes on the conservative wish list for overhauling higher education.
In the months since Milliken’s aborted golf game, much has been written about the Trump administration’s efforts to impose its will on UCLA, part of the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system. But an investigation by ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education,based on previously unreported documents and interviews with dozens of people involved, revealsthe extent to which the government violated legal and procedural norms to gin up its case against the school. It also surfaced something equally alarming: How the UC system’s deep dependence on federal money inhibited its willingness to resist the legally shaky onslaught, a vulnerability the Trump administration’s tactics brought into sharp focus.
According to former DOJ insiders, agency political appointees dispatched teams of career civil rights lawyers to California in March, pressuring them to rapidly “find” evidence backing a preordained conclusion: that the UC system and four of its campuses had illegally tolerated antisemitism, which would violate federal civil rights statutes.
The career attorneys eventually recommended a lawsuit against only UCLA, which had been rocked by pro-Palestinian protests in the spring of 2024. But even that case was weak, the lawyers acknowledged in a previously unreported internal memo we obtained. It documented the extensive steps UCLA had already taken to address antisemitism, many resulting from a Biden administration investigation based on the same incidents. The memo also noted there was no evidence that the harassing behavior that peaked during the protests was still happening.
Nonetheless, investigators sketched out a convoluted legal strategy to justify a new civil rights complaint against UCLA that several former DOJ lawyers called problematic and ethically dubious. Multiple attorneys who worked on it told us they were relieved they’d left the DOJ before they could be asked to sign it.
UCLA seemingly had every reason to push back aggressively. Yet UC system leaders have resisted calls from faculty and labor groups to file suit, fearing the many ways the government could retaliate against not only UCLA, but the entire university system, which relies on federal funds for a full one-third of its revenue. The government has opened probes into all 10 UC campuses, including at least seven that target UC Berkeley alone. “Thankfully, they’ve only fucked with UCLA at this point,” said one UC insider privy to the system’s thinking.
To tell this story, ProPublica and the Chronicle reviewed public and internal records and interviewed more than 50people, including DOJ attorneys who worked on the California investigations, UC officials and faculty, former government officials, Jewish leaders and legal experts. Some asked not to be identified, for fear the administration would retaliate or because they hadn’t been authorized to discuss the conflict. The Justice Department and its top officials did not respond to detailed questions and interview requests.
Over three decades leading public colleges, Milliken, 68, a dapper onetime Wall Street lawyer who goes by “JB,” has built a reputation as a pragmatist able to work with politicians of all stripes and navigate the culture wars. In an interview, he called the challenges facing the entirety of UC, and UCLA in particular, unparalleled in his career. “There’s nothing like this time,” he said. “This is singular. It’s the toughest.”
On Nov. 14, UC received a temporary reprieve. In response to a complaint brought by the American Association of University Professors, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin issued a scathing opinion finding that the Trump administration’s actions against UCLA had “flouted” legal requirements and ordered it to cease all “coercive and retaliatory conduct” against the UC system. Lin had already ordered the release of UCLA’s $584 million in frozen grant funding.
But those orders are preliminary and subject to appeal, and many people at UC fear that more attacks are coming. “Even if this holds, there will simply be another move from this administration,” said Anna Markowitz, an associate professor of education at UCLA and a leader of the campus faculty association, which is among the lawsuit’s plaintiffs. “They have not made it a secret what they wish to do.”
In interviews, UCLA researchers described the damage the school has absorbed so far. Even Jewish faculty members who endured antisemitism said they are aghast at the way the government has weaponized their complaints to justify cutting critical scientific research.
One of them is Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare and education whose description of his treatment at the hands of pro-Palestinian protesters is a prominent part of the lawsuit President Donald Trump’s DOJ recommended against UCLA. But he is dismayed at the cuts to research funds. “These are things that save people’s lives. Why are we messing with that? It’s a tool that anyone who’s a scholar would abhor,” he told us. “It looks like we’re being used.”
For Trump’s Justice Department, the University of California was a juicy target from the start.
With its 10 campuses, nearly 300,000 students, six medical centers and three national labs, UC is a crown jewel of a blue state — one whose governor, Gavin Newsom, has become one of Trump’s most prominent foes.
Its scientists have won 75 Nobel Prizes, including four this year alone. But as a high-powered science hub, it’s deeply dependent on federal funding, getting some $17.3 billion a year in research grants, student financial aid and reimbursements from government health programs. UC also has nothing like the endowment wealth of the Ivy League colleges, including Columbia and Brown, from which the Trump administration has extracted penalties in the tens or hundreds of millions.
Some of Trump’s DOJ appointees arrived with UC already in their crosshairs. Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, had sued UC officials in 2017 on behalf of two conservative student groups, alleging unfair treatment of conservative speakers they wanted to bring to the Berkeley campus. (UC settled the case a year later, agreeing to modify rules for speakers at Berkeley and pay $70,000 in legal costs.) And Trump had named Leo Terrell, the bombastic former Fox News commentator, to a top DOJ civil rights post where he heads the president’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. A UCLA School of Law graduate, Terrell had publicly declared in mid-2024 that his alma mater was “a national embarrassment” over its handling of “criminal antisemitic conduct.” Dhillon and Terrell didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In early February, just two weeks after Trump took office, his new attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a series of directives to the DOJ requiring “zealous advocacy” for Trump’s executive orders, attacks on all forms of “illegal DEI” and aggressive steps to combat antisemitism. Civil rights actions and investigations involving race and sex discrimination, historically the civil rights division’s chief focus, were largely abandoned.
On Feb. 28, Terrell’s task force announced plans to visit 10 U.S. campuses, including UCLA and UC Berkeley, that were alleged to have illegally failed to protect Jewish students and faculty members, to assess “whether remedial action is warranted.”
But by then, the new Justice leadership had already decided to investigate UC schools and already concluded that they were guilty.
In early March, Terrell declared on Fox News that students and employees in “the entire UC system” were “being harassed because of antisemitism.” The administration planned to “sue,” “bankrupt,” and “take away every single federal dollar” from such schools, he said, and the DOJ would file hate crime charges.
A team of about a dozen career DOJ lawyers had been assembled only days earlier to investigate the allegations of antisemitism against UC employees. Under the employment discrimination section of the Civil Rights Act, the occurrence of ugly antisemitic incidents or violence involving professors or staff wasn’t, by itself, enough to merit federal intervention. The legal standard was whether the university had engaged in a “pattern or practice” of tolerating antisemitism.
Before Trump took office, the civil rights division typically took more than a year to complete such a probe, according to DOJ veterans. Investigators would conduct interviews on campus, review reams of documents for compliance with various statutes and assess such complex matters as when hateful speech is protected by the First Amendment. Once a complaint was authorized, the civil rights division would seek voluntary compliance in a process that was meant to find solutions, not punish colleges.
In this case, the Justice Department’s political appointees demanded that investigators wrap things up in far less time — initially, a single month.
Career supervisors say they told their new bosses that they couldn’t, in one month, produce a case that could stand up in court. Still, “North” and “South” teams of lawyers were dispatched for multiday trips to California to dig up facts and interview officials at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Francisco and UCLA.
“We were told what the outcome will be: ‘You have one month to find evidence to justify a lawsuit and draft a complaint against the UC system,’” said Ejaz Baluch, a senior trial attorney in the civil rights division who worked on the investigation before leaving the Justice Department in May.
“The incredibly short timing of this investigation is just emblematic of the fact that the end goal was never to conduct a thorough, unbiased investigation,” Jen Swedish, who was the deputy chief of Justice’s employment litigation section until May, said in an interview. “The end goal was to file a damn complaint — or have something to threaten the university.”
Trump’s appointee as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights was Michael Gates, formerly the city attorney in Huntington Beach, California, who assumed the DOJ post vowing to help “win this country back.” “You guys have found a hostile work environment, right?” lawyers on the UC team recall him asking, just three weeks into the investigation.
