Judge rules with Jewish students, says UCLA can’t allow them to be barred from accessing campus after protests

A federal judge on Tuesday issued a preliminary injunction against the prestigious University of California, Los Angeles, saying the school cannot allow Jewish students to be barred from accessing classes and campus.

The ruling is the first of its kind against a university pertaining to anti-Israel protests that roiled American college campuses this year.

Three Jewish students had filed a complaint against the Regents of UCLA in June saying the university devolved into a “hotbed of antisemitism” in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war and the school failed to ensure the safety of Jewish students and full access to campus facilities. 

Protests erupted on campus in late April to early May in which pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up an encampment in the center of campus and put up barricades. 

The complaint alleged the protesters created a “Jew Exclusion Zone” where in order to pass “a person had to make a statement pledging their allegiance to the activists’ view.” Those who complied with the protester view were issued a wristband to allow them to pass through, the complaint said, which effectively barred access to Jewish students that supported Israel and denied them access to the heart of campus. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi sided with the three students, and rebuked the school. 

“Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom,” he wrote.

The filing said that when the protests broke out on campus, the three Jewish students stopped passing through major quads and courtyards on campus including Powell Library, because it meant traversing the encampment and “carried a risk of violence.”

Ultimately, those protests were cleared out by law enforcement.

“If any part of UCLA’s ordinarily available programs, activities, and campus areas become unavailable to certain Jewish students, UCLA must stop providing those ordinarily available programs, activities, and campus areas to any students,” Scarsi wrote.

How to handle making those programs and access available again is up to UCLA’s discretion, he added.

As a result, the regents of UCLA are prohibited from offering programs, activities or campus access if the defendants know they’re not “fully and equally accessible to Jewish students.”

The filing noted that the exclusion of Jewish students includes exclusion of Jewish students based on religious beliefs concerning the Jewish state of Israel.

UCLA said that it has made remedial actions following the encampment including the creation of a new Office of Campus Safety and the “transfer of day-to-day responsibility for campus safety to an Emergency Operations Center,” the filing said. However, Scarsi said the changes “do not minimize the risk that Plaintiffs ‘will again be wronged.’”

NBC News has reached out to UCLA for comment on the ruling.

UCLA spokesperson Mary Osako told The Associated Press that the ruling “would improperly hamstring our ability to respond to events on the ground and to meet the needs of the Bruin community.”