A former Justice Department attorney casts doubt on claims of systemic antisemitism at Brown, Harvard and Columbia.
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The Trump administration task force charged with investigating antisemitism on Ivy League campuses pressured universities into punitive settlements despite turning up little to no evidence of systemic abuse, according to a whistleblower complaint made public Tuesday.
The complaint — filed by Haley Van Erem, a former career attorney in the Justice Department’s civil rights division who said she was involuntarily detailed to work on the probes last year — alleged that the outcomes of investigations into schools like Harvard, Brown and Columbia were “predetermined without regard to the evidence” in a “politically mandated effort” to suspend their government funding and grab headlines.
When career attorneys raised objections that the evidence did not support the administration’s position or the tactics it was pursuing, including targeting Muslim professors for interviews, they were overruled and ignored, she said.
“Ms. Van Erem and other DOJ assignees repeatedly warned that funding suspensions lacked legal basis and that evidence did not support findings of violations at Brown,” Van Erem’s attorneys wrote in the 25-page filing, adding, “In the cases of Columbia and Harvard, no complete investigation was conducted.”
Van Erem left the Justice Department in May 2025, her attorneys said, because she was “unwilling to be made vulnerable to further participation in politically motivated investigations unsupported by facts and contrary to law.” Her disclosures Tuesday could bolster concerns raised by critics that the administration’s self-proclaimed push to combat antisemitism on campus was in fact an effort to punish schools it deemed ideologically opposed to its agenda.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department said it “stands behind the integrity of these investigations.”
Van Erem’s attorneys filed her complaint Monday with the Republican chairs and senior Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary committees. The document was released Tuesday by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.
“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,” Raskin said in letter to Harmeet K. Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
Since President Donald Trump’s return to the White House last year, he has repeatedly acted in response to conservative complaints about antisemitism at U.S. universities. Large-scale pro-Palestinian protests erupted on many college campuses following the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks and Israel’s scorched-earth retaliatory invasion of Gaza.
“These attacks unleashed an unprecedented wave of vile anti-Semitic discrimination, vandalism, and violence against our citizens, especially in our schools and on our campuses,” Trump wrote in an executive order establishing the task force just days into his second term.
Amid the protests, some Jewish students have alleged schools have done little to protect them from targeting and harassment. Universities have generally said they are working to find the right balance between the First Amendment rights of protesters and the safety of the students.
The effort has also divided the Jewish community, with some members welcoming Trump’s high-profile push against antisemitism and others criticizing it as pretext to undermine free speech and educational institutions.
Former attorney general Pam Bondi launched the multiagency antisemitism task force in February 2025, at the direction of the White House.
DOJ and the other agencies involved, including the Departments of Health and Human Services and Education, made it clear their first priority was universities.
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Attorneys for Van Erem said in her complaint that she was among a number of Justice Department lawyers involuntarily pulled from jobs investigating pressing civil rights matters and detailed to HHS to pursue antisemitism concerns.
Her complaint primarily focused on the group’s investigations of three Ivy League universities: Harvard, Columbia and Brown.
In the case of Brown, Van Erem alleged her team was surprised to discover the administration had blocked more than $500 million in federal funding to the school before its investigation was complete.
In the end, she alleged, her team did not find evidence to support the administration’s claims that university leaders had systemically violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin, in its dealings with Jewish students.
But a top HHS official on the task force, Daniel Shieh, reportedly told its members that “there’s no way we’re going to get a letter of no violation cleared” by administration higher-ups, and pushed the task force to pursue a settlement with the university instead, Van Erem’s lawyers said.
Van Erem also said she and other task force members were asked to interview Muslim professors on the campus — not because of any complaints lodged against them, but to see what they might say in hopes that it could be cast as antisemitic.
Brown in July 2025 opted to settle with the Justice Department, agreeing to spend $50 million over 10 years on workforce development programs in Rhode Island, where the school is based, while admitting no wrongdoing.
An HHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
In the case of Columbia, Van Erem said, DOJ’s representatives on the task force were given only hours to review claims that officials hoped to cite to justify an administration finding that the university had violated Jewish students’ civil rights. In some cases, she suggested, the claims involved little more than activists’ expressions of support for Palestinians.
“My main concern is that a lot of these [examples] involve protected speech and this document should not imply that those incidents are the basis of a Title VI violations,” she wrote at the time about the Columbia allegations in a message quoted in her complaint.
Nevertheless, the task force pressed on, securing a settlement from Columbia in July 2025 with the school agreeing to pay $200 million over three years for the alleged violations.
Trump administration officials hoped similar pressures would convince officials at Harvard to settle, Van Erem said. According to her complaint, early drafts of a proposed settlement with the school included provisions that went well beyond addressing antisemitism, such as ending DEI programs, installing a provost to oversee curriculum and putting endowment money into trusts the government could seize.
Sean Keveney, then the general counsel at HHS, told task force members he believed Harvard would settle because they are “over a barrel,” Van Erem said. Keveney has since left the agency and now serves as chief counsel at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Harvard, however, took the case to court and won. Last year, a federal judge reversed more than $2.6 billion in cuts in federal research funding to the school, accusing the Trump administration of using “antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”
Last week, another judge dismissed an administration lawsuit accusing Harvard of ignoring harassment of Jewish students, saying the incidents described were “too isolated and episodic” to support claims of systemic violations.
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Danielle Douglas-Gabriel contributed to this report.
