The case out there seems like Trump & Co. is using a civil rights ruling from the Supreme ‘s to discriminate against Blacks and Asian Americans?….
A federal judge on Monday ordered the Trump administration to restart the flow of about $500 million in funding for scientific research it withheld from the University of California, Los Angeles, sparing the university for now from a devastating fiscal blow.
While only temporary, the ruling issued by U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin in San Francisco was a significant victory for UCLA and the rest of the sprawling UC system, which has been caught up in a campaign by federal officials to punish high profile universities for what President Donald Trump and other conservatives allege was their overly permissive response to student protests over Israel’s war in Gaza and failure to address antisemitism on their campuses.
In the withholding of research funds, the administration found a potent source of leverage to extract concessions from schools. Columbia University, the first major school to land in Trump’s crosshairs, ultimately agreed to pay the government $200 million and make a series of reforms to get back $400 million in research grants that the government withheld over claims the school violated the civil rights of Jewish students and faculty. Other schools also reached agreements, while Harvard University remains locked in negotiations over $2 billion in funding….
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Lin is also presiding over a separate lawsuit filed on Tuesday by the American Association of University Professors and other unions, which are suing the administration over using civil rights laws to exert control over the UC system and seeking legal relief from financial actions.
In August, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to slash more than $780 million in NIH grants to various universities because they allegedly promoted diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives the president has decried as being part of liberal “woke” thinking. Jason Altabet, a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice, cited the high court’s ruling during the hearing Thursday before Lin and a concurring opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett that stated federal grant terminations should be filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which handles disputes over government contracts.
But Lin appeared skeptical, arguing that individual researchers, who are third parties to the contracts, would have to rely on the UC to sue on their behalf in the federal claims court. Absent the university stepping in, Lin indicated, the researchers would have no recourse for contesting the cuts…
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“Imagine that some presidential administration simply decided to terminate all of the grants to Black individuals, or you say all with Asian names,” Chemerinsky said. “It can’t be that no court would have jurisdiction to provide relief to the individuals, because there wasn’t an officially announced policy with regard to it.”….