Labor Unions Sue Over Trump Admin Freezing $400 Million in Funding to Columbia University

The lawsuit was filed after the Ivy League school agreed to conditions for protecting Jewish students in the future.

New York Police Department officers arrest students as they take them from a building that had been barricaded by pro-Palestinian student protesters at Columbia University, in New York City on April 30, 2024. Charly Triballeau/AFP

Organizations representing K–12 and higher education teachers asked a federal judge to restore $400 million in grants that the Trump administration rescinded from Columbia University following an investigation into campus anti-Semitism.

The lawsuit, filed on March 25 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by the American Federation of Teachers union and the American Association of University Professors, accuses the Department of Education and the Department of Justice of violating the First Amendment by “using funding cuts as a cudgel to coerce a private institution to adopt restrictive speech codes and allow government control over teaching and learning.”