‘Extortion’: Newsom Threatens to Sue After Trump Fines UCLA $1 Billion

California Gov. Gavin Newsom threatened to sue the Trump administration on Friday over what he called “extortion,” after the federal government proposed that UCLA pay $1 billion to settle allegations of antisemitism at UCLA and restore more than half a billion dollars in frozen federal grant funding.

“Donald Trump today is trying to silence academic freedom; he’s attacking one of the most important public institutions in the United States of America,” Newsom told reporters.

At a meeting between California Democratic leaders and Texas Democrats who fled the state to delay congressional redistricting efforts, Newsom addressed and pushed back against the proposal.

“He has threatened us through extortion with a billion-dollar fine unless we do his bidding. So as long as I am governor, I will stand tall and push back against that, and I believe every member of the California legislature feels the same way,” Newsom said.

In a statement on Friday, University of California President James Milliken said, “As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians.”

In exchange for renewed federal funding, the Department of Justice would also require the UC to pay $172 million into a fund for people impacted by violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, according to CNN, which first broke the news. Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.

Milliken said UC officials offered earlier this week to engage in dialogue with the Department of Justice.

If approved, the agreement would mark the latest and largest settlement between the Trump administration and a university. Since President Donald Trump regained office, his government has targeted universities for alleged discrimination stemming from their perceived inaction against pro-Palestinian student activism. Columbia and Brown, both also facing suspended federal funding, agreed to settlements of over $220 million and $50 million, respectively, in recent weeks.

In their settlements, Columbia and Brown also agreed to federal oversight and changes to campus policies or curriculum, raising questions about the integrity of academic freedom on college campuses.

Along with the 10-figure payout, the Department of Justice’s proposal would require that UC officials agree to several other conditions, including a senior administrator who will oversee compliance with anti-discrimination laws and a monitor who can review admissions data, according to CNN. The university would also have to prohibit overnight protests and revise its protest policies.

The settlement additionally includes conditions that appear entirely unrelated to the initial antisemitism claims. UCLA would have to end race and ethnicity-based scholarships, stop providing gender affirming care in its hospital and medical school and ensure single-sex housing for women on campus, CNN reported.

“We will not be complicit in this kind of attack on academic freedom on this extraordinary public institution,” Newsom said. “We are not like some of those other institutions that have followed a different path.

Newsom has previously said that he would “fight like hell” against a deal between the university system and the federal government, referring to Columbia and Brown in his comments.

“This is about our competitiveness. It’s about the fate and future of this country. It’s about our sovereignty,” Newsom said Thursday. “It’s about so much more than the temperament of an aggrieved individual who happens to currently be president of the United States.”

While the UC officially operates independently from state leadership, Newsom said before the announcement of the federal government’s proposal that he is confident the university’s leaders will “do the right thing.”

“I’ll do everything in my power to encourage them to do the right thing and not to become another law firm that bends on their knees, another company that sells their soul, or another institution that takes the shortcut and takes the easy wrong versus the hard right,” Newsom said.

In a public letter to the university community on Wednesday, UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk said the loss of roughly $584 million in federal grants would be “devastating for UCLA and for Americans across the nation.”