Ivy League schools were pressured into settlements despite a lack of evidence, according to former DOJ lawyer.
Published On 18 Aug 2026
A whistleblower alleges that United States President Donald Trump’s administration’s findings that three of the country’s most prestigious academic institutions violated civil rights law by tolerating anti-Semitism were “predetermined” as part of a “politically mandated effort” that allegedly discarded standard investigative procedures.
The administration has now pushed back, disputing the whistleblower’s involvement in the investigations.
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A spokesperson for the Department of Justice (DOJ) has told Al Jazeera that former DOJ lawyer Haley Van Erem, whose lawyers submitted the complaint, “did not work on university investigations” during her tenure at the department.
Van Erem filed the complaint with the inspectors general at the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services and the Office of Special Counsel. The civil rights lawyer spent nearly a decade working in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division before being involuntarily assigned to help with the task force last year, according to the disclosure. She ended up vacating her role at the DOJ in May 2025 because she was “unwilling to be made vulnerable to further participation in politically motivated investigations unsupported by facts and contrary to law”, according to the complaint, which also accuses the task force of targeting Muslim professors.
The complaint, obtained and reported on by The Associated Press news agency, also alleges that Trump’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism pushed for multimillion-dollar settlements with Ivy League universities despite government investigations that failed to establish any legal wrongdoing by the universities. The disclosure described political appointees overruling career investigators and targeting professors based on religion and ethnicity.
The work of the multi-agency task force was “marked by extraordinary procedural irregularities, predetermined outcomes without factual or legal support” and a slight to the law and Constitution, lawyers for the former government lawyer wrote in seeking watchdog investigations into their client’s allegations.
The task force, launched by the Justice Department under then-Attorney General Pam Bondi in February 2025, was created by Trump via an executive order to root out what the administration said was extensive “antisemitic harassment in schools and on college campuses” following protests that broke out at institutions across the country as Israel waged its genocidal war in Gaza.
The complaint alleges that the investigations into the Ivy League schools were pursued to strong-arm them into striking deals for politically motivated reasons, and that the outcome of the investigations was preordained with the purpose of extracting money from schools through settlement demands and funding freezes under the pretext of rooting out anti-Semitism.
The DOJ spokesperson said they “stand behind the integrity of these investigations”.
Representative Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has launched an investigation into the explosive whistleblower allegations that the Trump administration’s political appointees “grossly manipulated” federal anti-Semitism investigations to target certain American universities, punish protected speech and force schools into settlements despite government investigators finding insufficient evidence to verify any Title VI violations.
“From the start of the Trump Administration’s ferocious attack on universities, it has been apparent that its investigations have been structured deliberately to harass and intimidate rather than protect anyone from discrimination,” wrote Raskin in a press release on Tuesday.
“Your ‘investigation’ into antisemitism was fake, a pre-baked frame-up operation thoroughly political in nature,” wrote Raskin separately, in a letter addressed to Harmeet Dhillon, who, as the assistant attorney general in charge of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, had been a public face of the department’s efforts to counter anti-Semitism.
Raskin did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment at the time of writing.
Both Brown and Columbia settled with the administration. Columbia agreed to pay $200m over three years, and Brown agreed to spend $50m on Rhode Island workforce development, even though the task force found no formal admission of university misconduct.
A federal judge last year ordered the Trump administration to reverse its cuts of more than $2.6bn in research funding for Harvard, saying the government “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities”. A different judge last week dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit that accused Harvard of turning a blind eye to harassment of Jewish students.
