SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 17, (AP): The Trump administration is using civil rights laws to wage a campaign against the University of California in an attempt to curtail academic freedom and undermine free speech, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by faculty, staff, student organizations and every labor union representing UC workers.

The lawsuit comes weeks after the Trump administration fined the University of California, Los Angeles $1.2 billion and froze research funding after accusing the school of allowing antisemitism on campus and other civil rights violations. It was the first public university to be targeted with a widespread funding freeze.

The administration has frozen or paused federal funding over similar allegations against elite private colleges, including Harvard, Brown and Columbia. According to the lawsuit, the Trump administration has made several demands in its proposed settlement offer to UCLA, including giving government access to faculty, student, and staff data, releasing admissions and hiring data, ending diversity scholarships, banning overnight demonstrations on university property and cooperating with immigration enforcement.

The Department of Justice didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did the office of the UC system's president. Stett Holbrook, a spokesman for the University of California system, said that while the university is not involved in the lawsuit, it is part of numerous legal and advocacy efforts to restore and maintain funding.

"Federal cuts to research funding threaten lifesaving biomedical research, hamper US economic competitiveness and jeopardize the health of Americans who depend on the University’s cutting-edge medical science and innovation,” he said in a statement. The coalition that sued is led by the American Association of University Professors union, or AAUP, and represented by Democracy Forward, a legal group that has brought other lawsuits against the Trump administration over frozen federal funds.

"The blunt cudgel the Trump administration has repeatedly employed in this attack on the independence of institutions of higher education has been the abrupt, unilateral, and unlawful termination of federal research funding on which those institutions and the public interest rely,” the lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco said. The US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has launched dozens of federal investigations also targeting K-12 school districts.