A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily barred the University of California, Los Angeles, from allowing protesters to set up encampments that blocked Jewish students from having access to central parts of the campus.

Issuing a preliminary injunction in favor of three Jewish students who had sued UCLA, Judge Mark C. Scarsi said university administrators were prohibited from offering any programs, activities or access to campus if they were not “fully and equally accessible to Jewish students.”

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“Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith,” Scarsi, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, wrote in the order. “This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating.”

He added that UCLA had argued that it “has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters.” But Scarsi said it did not matter who blocked the students.

Lawyers for the students said the injunction was the first in the nation against what they called “an antisemitic encampment.” Last spring, scores of pro-Palestinian encampments protesting Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip sprang up at campuses across the nation. Many, including the one at UCLA, were broken up by police, leading to more than 3,100 arrests nationwide, and in some cases, physical confrontations.

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Amid the clashes, Jewish students said they felt threatened and intimidated by the encampments. Protesters, on the other hand, said they were exercising their rights to free speech.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Anemona Hartochollis/Mark Abramson
c.2024 The New York Times Company