The Justice Department has concluded that UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine engaged in intentional racial discrimination in its admissions process, selecting Black and Hispanic applicants on the basis of race even after the Supreme Court outlawed the practice in 2023.
The finding caps a yearlong federal civil rights investigation and lands squarely on one of the most politically charged fault lines in American higher education: whether elite institutions quietly preserved racial preferences after the court told them to stop.
Federal investigators determined that the medical school continued race-conscious admissions practices across three consecutive admissions cycles, covering the incoming classes of 2023, 2024, and 2025. That timeline means the school allegedly kept discriminating well after the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, which barred colleges from using race as a factor in admissions decisions.
The DOJ's findings letter put the legal principle bluntly.
"What cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly."
Investigators cited internal policies, admissions communications, application questions, and admissions data as the basis for their conclusion. The Washington Examiner reported that the school used tools such as the AAMC PREview exam guidance and secondary application questions about marginalized-group status in ways that effectively prompted applicants to disclose their race. In other words, the school allegedly found workarounds to extract the same racial information the Supreme Court said it could no longer consider.
The DOJ also pointed to outcome data. Admitted Black and Hispanic applicants, on average, had lower academic metrics than admitted white and Asian applicants. Federal officials cited this gap as evidence that race, not merit, was functioning as a determining factor in who got in and who did not.
Fox News reported that the investigation was prompted by a lawsuit from Do No Harm, a medical advocacy group that has challenged diversity-driven policies at hospitals and medical schools. The group's legal action apparently gave federal investigators the thread they needed to open a formal probe under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination by institutions receiving federal funding.
The DOJ alleged that the school intentionally selected minority applicants based in part on the belief that minority patients would receive better care from minority doctors. That rationale, whatever its policy appeal, runs directly into the Supreme Court's 2023 holding that universities cannot use racial classifications to achieve diversity goals in admissions.
The Justice Department is now seeking a voluntary resolution agreement with UCLA to bring the school into compliance. That approach gives the university a window to reform its practices before the department escalates to enforcement action, including the potential loss of federal funding.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon framed the findings in sharp terms. The Washington Free Beacon first reported on the DOJ's conclusions, building on its earlier investigative coverage of the medical school's admissions practices.
"UCLA's admissions process has been focused on racial demographics at the expense of merit and excellence, allowing racial politics to distract the school from the vital work of training great doctors."
Dhillon did not stop there. In a separate statement, she called the practice flatly un-American.
"Racism in admissions is both illegal and anti-American, and this department will not allow it."
First Assistant United States Attorney Bill Essayli reinforced the point. "Federal law and the Supreme Court precedent are clear: Race discrimination has no place in our nation's institutions of higher learning," Essayli said, as the New York Post reported.
The UCLA finding does not exist in a vacuum. The Justice Department under the current administration has signaled a willingness to use federal civil rights authority against institutions it believes are defying the Supreme Court's admissions ruling. The department recently filed a lawsuit against Harvard over similar concerns, marking a pattern of aggressive action against elite schools.
That posture extends beyond higher education. The DOJ has also opened a review of Biden-era FACE Act prosecutions targeting pro-life protesters, reflecting a broader willingness to revisit enforcement decisions that conservatives view as politically motivated.
The common thread is a department that appears ready to challenge institutional actors, whether universities, advocacy groups, or prior administrations, when it concludes that federal law has been violated or selectively enforced. The criminal probe into the SPLC's use of paid informants fits the same pattern of scrutinizing powerful organizations that long operated with minimal federal oversight.
UCLA has pushed back against the DOJ's conclusions. The university denies that its admissions practices violated federal law or the Supreme Court's ruling. The school has not, based on the available statements, offered a detailed public rebuttal of the specific evidence the DOJ cited, including the score and GPA disparities or the use of application questions that investigators said functioned as racial proxies.
That denial sets up a potential standoff. If UCLA refuses to enter a voluntary resolution agreement, the Justice Department would need to decide whether to escalate, potentially through litigation or by threatening the school's federal funding. For a major research university and teaching hospital, the loss of federal dollars would be catastrophic.
Breitbart noted that the DOJ's findings letter specifically stated the school "continues to intentionally discriminate against applicants based on their race after the Supreme Court's decision in Harvard by granting and denying admission on the basis of race." That language leaves little room for ambiguity about the department's position.
Several questions remain open. Authorities have not publicly confirmed whether individual admissions officials face personal liability or whether the investigation will expand to other UCLA programs beyond the medical school. Investigators have not said whether similar probes are underway at other medical schools that may have adopted comparable workaround strategies after the 2023 ruling.
The DOJ has also not disclosed the full scope of internal communications it reviewed. The findings letter referenced admissions guidance and internal policies, but the specific documents have not been made public. How deeply the racial preference ran, whether it was a top-down directive or a decentralized practice among admissions committee members, remains unclear from the public record.
The voluntary resolution process itself carries its own timeline uncertainty. These negotiations can stretch for months, and UCLA's public denial suggests the school may not be eager to sign an agreement that amounts to an admission of wrongdoing. The department has also used subpoenas in other politically sensitive investigations, a tool it could deploy here if cooperation stalls.
The practical consequences reach well past Westwood. If the DOJ's finding holds and UCLA is forced to overhaul its admissions process, the case becomes a template. Every medical school in the country that quietly preserved diversity-oriented admissions tools after 2023 will have to reckon with the same legal exposure.
The score and GPA disparity data cited by the DOJ also raises a question that medical schools have resisted confronting publicly: whether race-conscious admissions, however well-intentioned, produce measurable gaps in the academic qualifications of admitted students. The department's willingness to put that data in a formal findings letter signals that it views the evidence as strong enough to withstand legal challenge.
For conservatives who argued that the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling would be ignored by universities determined to preserve racial preferences, the UCLA finding is confirmation. For defenders of race-conscious admissions, it is a test of whether institutions can survive federal enforcement that treats workarounds as violations.
The Supreme Court said race cannot be used in admissions. The Justice Department says UCLA used it anyway. What happens next will determine whether the court's ruling has teeth or was just a suggestion.
