This post was updated Nov. 5 at 1:02 a.m.
A coalition of 25 student organizations filed an amicus brief Thursday in support of a lawsuit against President Donald Trump that alleged research funding suspensions to UCLA and subsequent settlement demands violated employees’ free speech.
The student organizations – filing under the name Students for Higher Education – said in the brief that the federal government’s “ruinous cuts to federal research funding,” its $1.2 billion settlement demand and attacks on international students obstruct the constitutionally protected free speech of students and faculty members. Three members of the Undergraduate Students Association Council also signed the brief in their personal capacity.
SHED – which includes five USAC offices, Bruin Democrats, the Asian Pacific Coalition at UCLA and Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA – said in the brief that petitioners mostly represent marginalized communities whom Trump’s actions are targeting, such as noncitizen students, pro-Palestine advocates and transgender students.
“All Amici agree that these malign actions have cast a pall of censorship over UCLA—chilling classroom discussions, faculty-student collaborations, and students’ ability to express themselves upon the most pressing and widely debated issues of the day,” the brief said. “Students are hurt when they must decide between governmental retribution and silence, and they lose out on educational opportunities when their professors are cowed into avoiding governmentally disfavored topics.”
A White House spokesperson did not respond in time for a request for comment on the brief.
Over 100,000 UC employees sued the Trump administration Sept. 16, alleging that its $1.2 billion demand for UCLA to regain its federal research funding illegally stifled free speech. They also alleged in the lawsuit that certain terms in the settlement proposal – which included demands that UCLA stop recognizing the identity of transgender people and that its hospitals no longer offer gender-affirming care to minors – attempted to use financial coercion to impose conservative ideology onto the university.
The case was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California under Judge Rita F. Lin, who previously ordered the temporary reinstatement of over $500 million of UCLA’s federal research grants after the federal government suspended them in late July. Lin will hear a preliminary injunction in this employee case Thursday.
The National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy alleged in letters explaining the funding suspensions that UCLA allowed antisemitism, illegal affirmative action practices and “men to participate in women’s sports.”
[Related: Federal funding cuts to UCLA]
Lin accepted the amicus brief Monday, and Trump’s lawyers did not oppose it, said Sherry Zhou, USAC’s external vice president.
Internal Vice President Tommy Contreras said that USAC, the official undergraduate student government of UCLA, was originally asked to sign onto the case as plaintiffs in September but were told they were not legally allowed to because they are a branch of ASUCLA – and therefore represent UCLA.
USAC’s executive team – President Diego Bollo, Contreras and Zhou – said they created the brief because they still wanted the lawsuit to include a student perspective. They added that the brief was fully student-initiated and led.
“There are no undergraduate student entities as plaintiffs on the actual lawsuit,” Zhou said. “We wanted to find a way to make sure that the judge was able to see the ways in which undergrad students have been impacted, specifically all of these organizations on campus who have been impacted by the cuts, and not just the cuts, but also the way that the pressure on the university has affected organizations as well.”
Anna Markowitz, the president of the UCLA Faculty Association and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that encouraged USAC to join, said the association is excited about the student amicus brief.
“We are honored to be connected with students who have bravely and compellingly put forward the ways in which the actions of the federal government are both currently affecting student life and are likely to have more dire consequences in the future,” she said in an emailed statement. “The federal government’s attempts to put ideology ahead of students is, for us, intolerable–and we recognize that the students’ voices and perspectives should be at the center as we think about the likely impacts of capitulation.”
SHED argued in the brief that the Trump administration has impaired students’ abilities to engage in free classroom discussion and impeded their constitutional right to free speech. The organizations added in the brief that they believe students who speak on topics that the Trump administration opposes – like “the rights of Palestinian people and US support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza; the proper role of diversity, equity and inclusion; and ‘biological truth’ regarding sex and gender” – have become targets of government retaliation.
The brief also alleged that international students on visas and other noncitizen students are especially vulnerable.
The Trump administration revoked the visas of at least 19 UCLA students and alumni in early April. Sam Nahidi, the director of the Dashew Center for International Students and Scholars, said in April that those who had their visas revoked had previously been arrested – with offenses ranging from “simple arrests with no convictions to full-blown court cases” – according to minutes from a meeting between USAC officers and UCLA administrators acquired by the Daily Bruin.
[Related: Students who had visas revoked were previously arrested, USAC meeting reveals]
However, the U.S. Department of Justice said in late April that it would reinstate students’ visas while developing a consistent framework for status termination. The coalition said the revocations had an impact on students, despite being reinstated.
“One lamentable measure of that inhibition at UCLA is that, in sharp contrast to prior years, international students there have drastically curtailed their participation in student government or campus advocacy, out of a fear that engagement in such activity might subject them to data sharing and heightened immigration scrutiny, and loss of legal protections,” the brief said. “The intimidation and silencing of international and non-citizen students is an enormous loss for the whole university community, sacrificing perspectives that enrich the intellectual and cultural atmosphere and discouraging the flow of talent from around the world.”
The brief also voiced fears that the federal government could demand that the UC release students’ personal data.
UC Berkeley released the information of about 160 of its students, faculty and staff to the federal government in August, according to the Daily Californian. UC San Diego also gave the information of some of its students and faculty away, according to the UCSD Guardian.
SHED said in the brief that the federal government is targeting the UC because the Trump administration views universities as “the enemy.”
Stett Holbrook, a spokesperson for the UC Office of the President, said in an emailed statement that the University is not party to the suit but is focused on protecting its mission.
“UC is committed to protecting the mission, governance, and academic freedom of the University,” he said in the statement.
The students also alleged in the brief that UCLA students have faced “irreparable educational harm” and a declining quality of learning because of Trump’s actions, claiming that professors have altered course materials and eliminated class subjects for fears of punishment from the federal government.
“Professors are aware that they, their university, and/or their students could be subject to retribution based on deviations from government-approved viewpoints or scholarly research into subject matters, such as health care equity, that have been pronounced ‘discriminatory’ and therefore impermissible,” the brief said. “This suppression inflicts serious, corollary harm on students.”
[Related: Fielding School of Public Health class on Palestine ordered to be canceled]
SHED added in the brief that funding cuts have forced faculty to teach without teaching assistants, further harming students’ education.
“The Trump Administration’s extralegal actions and threats against UCLA and the UC system are choking these vital processes, inflicting educational harms on countless individual students who are blameless by even the perpetrators’ own lights, to the detriment of all,” the brief said. “This damage is being inflicted for what, as a matter of American constitutional law, is the worst possible reason: To enforce government orthodoxy, punish deviation, silence free inquiry and open discussion and consideration of matters of which those currently holding federal office disapprove.”
[Related: UCLA Math department TA, grader cuts spark concern over student learning, support]
Contreras said that because the brief was written in a short time frame, it does not cover all the ways in which Trump’s attacks on the UC have impacted students. However, he added that USAC and SHED will continue to fight for students in any way they can.
“All we want is for the voices of the students to be adequately heard, represented and ultimately fought for,” he said. “We believe that their First Amendment rights are worth fighting for.”
Contreras said SHED’s brief should send a message to the UCLA administration that students are fighting for their university – even when facing fears of retaliation from their school and the federal government.
“That should send a message to UCLA that even amidst all this fear and all this uncertainty, they’ve had the same opportunity to speak up like us,” Contreras said. “It took students and student organizing to finally say, ‘You know what, we’ve had enough of this fear, and we’re going to fight back.’”
