The Trump administration, long critical of the way colleges handle campus protests, is sending a clear warning after multiple arrests were made outside of a Turning Point USA event this week.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) swiftly announced an investigation after anti-fascist demonstrators gathered at the University of California, Berkeley, against the last Turning Point stop of its college tour, which had begun with the event where the group’s founder, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated.
The administration has repeatedly cut or frozen the federal funding of schools that it feels have failed to keep the peace, and the first major protest of the academic year offered it a clear contrast: a university long seen as one of the most liberal in the country, and an advocacy group the president backs wholeheartedly.
At least three people were arrested during the protests, with fights breaking out and demonstrators chanting “No Trump, No KKK, no fascist USA” and “F— your dead homie,” referencing Kirk, local outlet Berkeleyside reported.
The university condemned the “use violence or intimidation to prevent lawful expression or chill free speech” and said the arrests were made by city and university police.
In its statement, UC Berkeley said it is working with local and federal authorities on the matter and lauded that the Turning Point event itself went forward without interruptions with 900 people in attendance.
Experts say it is too early and not enough details are known to determine if any free speech violations occurred.
“There are still a lot of unknowns exactly of how certain things started and initiated,” said Haley Gluhanich, senior program counsel for the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression.
But Gluhanich pressed administrators and the federal government to be careful how they proceed with any protest investigation and not to blur the line between crime and protected speech.
If the federal government is “looking at a situation and they are clearly seeing that the protests involved protected speech, the protests were peaceful, then no punishment,” she said.
“What I’ll also say is that to the extent that any public official calls for an individual to get punished, or they try to influence an institution to maybe punish an individual for their protected speech, the school has the obligation to abide by the First Amendment.”
UC Berkeley is no stranger to federal involvement in its investigations after the pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the spring of 2024 led to accusations of antisemitism and poor leadership.
But with protests against Israel tempered so far this school year, the Turning Point event was the first time the Trump administration has jumped back into campus demonstrations.
“This administration, @TheJusticeDept, and @CivilRights will be doing a deep dive into all the potential criminal and civil aspects of this horrific situation, including our concerns about UC Berkeley’s history of not protecting conservative speakers on its campus,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who oversees DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.
Dhillon, in another post, referred to a lawsuit Berkeley settled back in 2018 brought on by Republicans who said restrictions on speakers and security fees discriminated against conservative commentators coming on campus.
“The @CivilRights will investigate what happened here, and I see several issues of serious concern regarding campus and local security and Antifa’s ability to operate with impunity in CA,” Dhillon said.
Some see the events at UC Berkeley and the Justice Department’s interest as the perfect storm for the first targeted protest investigation of the academic year.
“I think that one of the challenges here is we need more consistent regulation on protest, because I think what you have is this case-by-case basis, where you have something that occurs like this, and then you have the Department of Justice launching an investigation potentially for partially in good faith or partially from a PR perspective, publicity perspective,” said Adam Swart, founder and CEO of Crowds on Demand.
“My worry is, what you have is the justice system has become so politicized because, on the one hand, you can’t necessarily trust the Berkeley police to appropriately investigate something like this, given that the Berkeley government is definitely controlled by the folks on the far left,” Swart added. “But conversely, you have the Department of Justice that has a real incentive, opposite incentive, to go hard on these people and to make this look bigger than it is.”
It is unlikely this will be the last school to see federal involvement over campus protests. The Trump administration has been quick to get involved in university politics in ways never before seen by a White House.
President Trump has pulled billions of dollars from universities and only restored the funding after certain demands were met, attempted to yank Harvard University’s ability to enroll foreign students, allegedly pushed for the ouster of the president of the University of Virginia and has made deals with several schools that includes getting access to admissions data.
“Since January, the Trump Administration has waged war on free speech at universities across the country. Officials have unlawfully punished speech critical of the government and suppressed dissenting viewpoints, chilling speech and undermining academic freedom,” said Chessie Thacher, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California.
“The First Amendment protects peaceful protest and the expression of dissenting views — even on charged topics like Turning Point USA. Berkeley is the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, so the government’s investigation into the recent campus protests strikes at ground zero for these constitutional principles and raises troubling questions about how officials continue to wield their investigatory powers,” Thacher added.
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