Pro-Palestinian group files lawsuit, says UCLA failed to protect protesters

A group of demonstrators filed a lawsuit against UCLA on Thursday, alleging that the university failed to protect protesters at a pro-Palestinian encampment last year.

The California Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations held a news conference near UCLA’s Luskin Conference Center where plaintiffs detailed the alleged trauma they endured when counterprotesters attacked the encampment on April 28, 2024, and at other points throughout the year.

“The university did not care about my voice. For over ten minutes on June 10th, I and my fellow protesters yelled as loudly as we could, ‘let us out, let us out’, and [police] still kettled us, threw us to the ground and arrested us,” one student recalled. “I couldn’t imagine that my pain would ever end, the pain my university decided that I deserved because I chose to speak my mind.”

Last spring, pro-Palestinian demonstrators built an encampment in the middle of campus to protest Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas. The encampment remained peaceful for several days before violence erupted between that group and a group of pro-Israeli counter-protesters. After that, university police, along with other law enforcement agencies, forcefully cleared out the encampment, resulting in several arrests.

The uproar over the university’s handling of the protests resulted in the replacement of UCLA’s chief of police.

A scathing independent report was released in November, claiming that UCLA had “institutional paralysis” during the events. Several members of law enforcement told interviewers that they didn’t know who was in charge while violent acts occurred on campus and that briefings on the situation were inadequate.

Earlier this month, the Department of Justice launched a civil investigation into the University of California system over allegations of systematic antisemitism.

As of Thursday afternoon, it wasn’t clear what the California Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations was seeking in its lawsuit.