A Whistle-Blower Speaks Out About Trump’s Crackdown on Campus Antisemitism

Résumé détaillé

A Justice Department lawyer assigned to work on an Administration task force began to suspect that the investigations were “outcome-driven.”

Shortly after Donald Trump’s second term as President began, a government lawyer named Haley Van Erem received a call from her section chief at the Department of Justice. At the time, Van Erem was working in the Special Litigation Section of the D.O.J.’s Civil Rights Division, which she’d entered through an honors program in 2015, a few years after graduating from Florida State University College of Law.

Not a lot has been heard from the government lawyers who have served on this task force, which was announced following an executive order issued in January, “to root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses,” a goal that the Trump Administration announced shortly before it fired nearly half the staff at the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Van Erem agreed to meet with me recently to discuss her experience. It was the first time that she had spoken about the task force’s investigations with a journalist.

A week after she was transferred to work on the Joint Task Force, she told me, she received a memo about investigations that had been opened into several prominent university medical schools, including Columbia’s, Harvard’s, and Brown’s, for allegedly violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs that receive federal funding. The memo, which The New Yorker has not independently reviewed, did not cite a large body of evidence to justify this step: it relied heavily on an article published on January 27, 2025, in the New York Post.

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