DOJ investigating how the University of Washington handles antisemitism

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon posted on social media Monday that her Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice will investigate the University of Washington’s “handling of antisemitism.”

A UW spokesperson told KUOW the university was notified that the Justice Department is “conducting a compliance review.”

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department has investigated 60 American universities and sued some of them for billions of dollars in his second term. Many have settled or agreed to change policies.

UW itself has mandated a campuswide civil rights training as part of a voluntary agreement in January with the U.S. Department of Education after allegations of unchecked antisemitism on-campus in 2023 and 2024.

But it’s unclear how much of this new review will focus on pro-Palestinian protests on campus. The inciting incident Dhillon seemed to post about was an off-campus fundraiser by a group the university has disavowed and de-registered: Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return, or SUPER UW.

“Tomorrow, a student group—SUPER UW—is holding a fundraising event for the ‘Lebanese resistance,’” Dhillon posted on X Monday. “The group has a history of violent antisemitic activity of University of Washington’s campus.”

While most pro-Palestinian protest groups reached an agreement with UW in 2024 and stopped occupying parts of UW’s campus, SUPER has continued and escalated. In 2025, 33 activists were arrested after they took over a new engineering building and smashed lab equipment inside. They’ve been charged with misdemeanors for criminal trespass, and a UW spokesperson said 23 of them who were students on campus were suspended last year, but can now return to class.

UW has also suspended SUPER’s registration as a university group, and last month appealed to Meta to stop the group from using “UW” in its name online.

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The Department of Justice didn’t respond to a request for comment about whether an off-campus fundraiser by a group no longer affiliated with the university was the trigger for this investigation, or how far its scope would reach.

“The University will cooperate with the review and provide information and responses,” Victor Balta, UW’s assistant vice president for communications, wrote in an email. “The University of Washington strongly and unequivocally opposes antisemitism in all forms.”

This isn't the first time the feds have looked into UW's policies on handling anti-Jewish sentiment. In May 2025, after SUPER's 33 activists took over the university engineering building, a federal "Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism" initiated a review and said it expected "the institution to follow up with enforcement actions and policy changes that are clearly necessary to prevent these uprisings moving forward."

Surveys and focus groups on UW's campus in 2024 found that while many Jewish students reported being the target of anti-semitic slurs or harassment, others said they'd been targeted by fellow Jews for supporting Gazans, and many Palestinian students also felt the need to hide their identities on campus for fear of discrimination.