This article covers the third and final day of the UC Regents’ meeting at the Luskin Conference Center (March 20, 2025). For our full coverage of the meeting, read here.
Attorneys and pro-Palestinian activists announced on Thursday that they had filed a civil rights lawsuit against the UC, UCLA, UCPD, LAPD, California Highway Patrol, and several counterprotesters who violently attacked UCLA’s Palestine Solidarity Encampment last spring.
In a press conference that took place outside the UC Regents meeting at the Luskin Conference Center, students and community members recounted the violence inflicted upon them at the Palestine Solidarity Encampment and the June 10 funeral procession action. They condemned the UCLA administration for its role in the events that left numerous students hospitalized and arrested.
35 students, faculty, community members, reporters, and legal observers are alleging that the events of April 30-May 2 violated their civil rights and left many of them with life-altering injuries and trauma. According to a press release by the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the civil rights lawsuit “seeks to hold those who engaged in violence, harassment, and intimidation against Palestine solidarity activists accountable and remedy the failure to protect them.”
On the night of April 30, pro-Israel counterprotesters moved to attack the Palestine Solidarity Encampment (PSE) after pro-Palestinian demonstrators did not engage with their attempts to agitate the encampment with amplified sound and graphic videos on a jumbotron. The scene quickly turned violent, as growing numbers of agitators attempted to forcibly break through the barricades and others threw fireworks into the encampment.
According to the PSE medics, at least 25 protesters were taken to the emergency room for blunt-force trauma, fractures, lacerations, and chemical-induced injuries as the counterprotester assailants beat students and sprayed bear mace at those in the encampment. Campus security and law enforcement watched the attacks unfold, but police declined to intervene until around 2:45 a.m., nearly four hours after the violence began.
California Highway Patrol (CHP) swept the encampment the next night with the support of LAPD and LASD upon UCLA’s request. After making their first attempt to break through the encampment’s barricades around 1:25 a.m., law enforcement arrested over 200 protesters and hospitalized at least 15 before dismantling the PSE.
Thistle Boosinger, a plaintiff and community member who joined the PSE, recounted consistent escalations by pro-Israel counterprotesters in the nights leading up to the April 30 attack. In the Thursday press conference, Boosinger discussed how counterprotesters threw bunches of bananas into the PSE upon discovering that a demonstrator was severely allergic, left a backpack filled with rats in the encampment, and raised nearly $100,000 for a GoFundMe “planning something very big” for the encampment.
On this night, I learned what a stink bomb smells like. I learned what it feels for fireworks to go off within several feet of your body. I learned what it feels like for your clothes to be drenched in mace so that every inch of your body, your eyes, the inside of your mouth, burns like it’s on fire.
Thistle Boosinger, plaintiff and community member, describing the events of April 30
Plaintiffs detailed the injuries they suffered the night of April 30, including Boosinger, who related experiences with chronic hand pain after their hand was smashed into a barricade by an assailant. UCLA graduate Afnan Khawaja told reporters that he suffered a concussion from a strike to the head with a wooden plank and also described how his eyes briefly became sealed shut after being attacked with pepper spray. He told the crowd that “the true violence [is] the silence of an institution that calls itself the #1 public university,” asking “What is freedom of speech if students cannot speak their mind?”.
Plaintiffs are seeking financial compensation, but also for UCLA to change its policies on political speech and campus policing. After 2020’s mass protests against police violence, the UC committed to following “de-escalation methods in the event of violence” before calling external law enforcement agencies to campus, a commitment that civil rights attorney Thomas Harvey said the UC violated in response to pro-Palestinian protests.
Attorneys added that they hope UCLA will hold PSE attackers to account and revise how assemblies are deemed unlawful on campus, a designation used by police officers to clear the PSE and subsequent encampments in the spring.
Two faculty members on the UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism also spoke at the press conference. Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA, condemned the “administrative policies that have turned our campus into a police state,” calling UCLA “an unsafe environment for students and faculty who advocate for Palestinian rights and oppose war and genocide.”
Kelley defended the lawsuit’s timing, saying that the pressure put on US universities by the Trump administration should not deter the plaintiffs. Referring to the arrest of two Palestinian Columbia students by ICE, he told the crowd that “students are being disappeared right now” with universities’ compliance, adding that “it looks like UCLA is moving in that direction as well.” He remarked that “the need to speak out and stop this genocide is more urgent than ever.”
Co-chair of the UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism Sherene Razack, Distinguished Professor and Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies, commented on the “glaring” asymmetry between administrative responses to recommendations put forth by their task force and the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias.
The two task forces were created at the same time as advisory to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost. Chancellor Frenk announced that UCLA will implement the recommendations of the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias on March 10, including “improving the complaint system and “assuring enforcement of current and new laws and policies.”
In an open letter to Chancellor Julio Frenk published Thursday, the same day of the lawsuit’s announcement, the Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism wrote that administration met three reports “documenting the racism, discrimination and violence directed at Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs and anyone, including Jews, who express opposition to the war in Gaza” with a “refusal to engage.”
The letter told Chancellor Frenk that “in your endorsement of one task force and not the other, you have demonstrated racial and religious animus and discrimination towards Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs, and towards the Task Force itself. Your action dismisses our labor and ignores the violence and discrimination we have documented.”
S, a member of Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine, told UCLA Radio that “it is clear that UCLA only takes this task force seriously because it aligns with its interests in crushing pro-Palestinian speech,” saying that “while the first task force is led by leading experts in racism and colonialism, the second is led by a Zionist in the field of real estate, Stuart Gabriel.”
They said they hoped that the lawsuit will serve as “a wake-up call for the Regents, and it should force them to recognize that we will not tolerate their anti-Palestinian racism, surveillance, persecution and repression any longer.”
This lawsuit is just one step in a larger fight to take back our university from the business interests of the UC Regents and to treat anti-Palestinian racism with the seriousness it deserves.
S, Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine
At the press conference, Personal Injury Lawyer Lenore Shefman told the crowd that “community is power,” saying that “it scares the executive branch, the executive branch of our school, the executive branch of our government.” Shefman said that plaintiffs “gathered in hope of repairing the world,” invoking the Jewish phrase tikkun olam (repair the world), saying that “we are born into that mandate.”
Binyamin Moryosef, an Israeli-American student and plaintiff, said that he was “appalled by antisemitism coming from the university,” accusing it of engaging in the “silencing of Jewish voices that criticize Israel by erasing them from discussion.”
Moryosef recounted being trapped by police officers behind Dodd Hall as they began making arrests following the June 10 funeral procession encampments, saying that he won’t forget the pinching feeling of zip-ties.
Shortly after establishing a new encampment outside Royce Hall to read the names of Palestinians killed by Israeli operations in Gaza, the student protesters received a “Notice of Withdrawal of Consent to Remain on Campus.” They relocated the encampment to Kerckhoff Patio and then a courtyard near Dodd Hall, where police officers blocked exits and started arresting demonstrators before they issued a dispersal order.
Opposing antisemitism, defending the rights of the oppressed, calling for the just and humane treatment of all people even in the face of opposition: that’s what I was raised to believe and what I stood for as I protested. And the university showed me how much they valued my voice as an Israeli-American. They stood by for four hours as fireworks rained down on us like the bombs Israel dropped on the Palestinians.
Binyamin Moryosef, plaintiff and Jewish Israeli-American student at UCLA
This press conference coincided with the final day of the UC Board of Regents meeting at UCLA, where the UC Divest Coalition demanded that the Regents engage in a public meeting to discuss divestment from weapons manufacturing. At a public comment session earlier in the day, two law students at UCLA announced the lawsuit and told the Regents that “UCLA attempted to intimidate [the plaintiffs] out of free speech because that free speech was against the genocide in Palestine.”
They added that they “hope [the Regents] will read the suit and take it seriously, as it presents a more accurate picture of what happened last spring than what the media and the UC itself would like to push.”
Stett Holbrook, a spokesperson for the UC Office of the President, said that the UC has “instituted system-wide reforms to promote safety and combat harassment and discrimination on our campuses,” writing that the university is “currently gathering additional information” about the lawsuit.
S told UCLA Radio that they think the lawsuit “presents an important opportunity for the UC Regents to meet [UC Divest’s] demands. Until they do, we will continue to make our voices heard… and we will continue to do so until divestment.”
At an open session held by the Regents meeting later in the day, members of the UC Divest Coalition disrupted the meeting. As the Board of Regents heard an annual report on student basic needs, a student stood up and exclaimed “UC Regents, if you care about basic needs, then why do you keep investing in genocide? For three days we’ve been peacefully demanding that you actually meet with us about ending your investments in the war industry.”
A UCPD officer entered the room within seconds of the disruption as students began to chant “UC Regents, pick a side, justice or genocide.” As a line of officers equipped with riot gear soon followed, the student activists slowly moved out of the room, continuing to chant “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.”
One protester shouted, “This is your last chance to actually meet with us; so far your only response has been police violence. The only response to our demand for a simple meeting has been deploying police in riot gear on peaceful protesters.” Students shouted “Shame on you!” to the board before leaving.
UCPD officers in riot gear responded to a picket by the UC Divest Coalition in the Luskin Turnaround on Tuesday and again when the group occupied the Engineering IV building patio the following morning, naming it the “Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh Liberated Zone.” Activists left the patio after law enforcement entered the building and no arrests were made on either day.
Chief Investments Officer Jagdeep Singh Bachher declined to organize a public meeting on Tuesday according to UC Divest, instead offering to meet privately with five organizers if they removed face coverings and agreed not to record the meeting. The group refused to participate in a meeting not open to the public, saying that they “reject dialogue with no substantive action.”
As universities across the country come under scrutiny by the Trump administration, the UC Regents find themselves under opposing pressure from both the federal government and students calling for divestment. Student activists hope the lawsuit will force their hand on campus expression policies. These sentiments were echoed by attorney Hani Habbas who told reporters that “silencing dissent is not keeping the peace. It is caging the truth, and the truth does not die quietly.”
