A federal judge in San Francisco on Sept. 23 ordered President Donald Trump’s administration to restore $500 million in grant funding to researchers at the University of California—Los Angeles (UCLA).

U.S. District Judge Rita Lin had previously ordered the National Science Foundation to unfreeze $81 million in grants to the university, saying the government acted “through unreasoned form letters with little or no explanation, and from cutting off funds to stop research involving forbidden topics such as diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

The Department of Justice announced on July 29 that UCLA had violated the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by failing to defend its Jewish students from anti-Semitism.

A few days later, UCLA revealed that the government was canceling $584 million in research grants for the university.

A White House official later confirmed that the administration was seeking to settle the civil rights dispute for $1 billion. Trump recently settled similar disputes with Brown University for $50 million and Columbia University for $221 million.

Harvard has sued the government over similar funding cuts, and on Sept. 3, a federal judge ruled that those cuts were illegal.

The plaintiffs in the UCLA case were individual researchers, not the university itself. They said the government has violated the Administrative Procedures Act by canceling the grants abruptly and without providing enough rationale.

They also accused the government of violating the First Amendment, saying the grants were canceled based on “viewpoint discrimination.”

The government disputed the idea that the grants were terminated by “form letters” and without consideration. To prove this, it submitted several grant termination letters it had previously issued to UCLA and other universities.

For one project, “Health Effects of Intersectional Stigma among Sexual Minority Women,” a letter from NIH said that although its general policy is to suspend grants and allow recipients to amend any problems, “no corrective action is possible here” because the premise of that research project “is incompatible with agency priorities, and no modification of the project could align the project with agency priorities.”

The government also contended, as with many lawsuits challenging its funding cuts, that the case did not belong in district court, but should instead be heard in the Court of Federal Claims, since it is a contract dispute.

Lin rejected that argument. She wrote that even though a recent Supreme Court order sided with the government by kicking cases back to the Court of Federal Claims, that ruling did not apply here.

She said the arguments in that case were different, since the researchers at UCLA “are not parties to the grant agreements and could not obtain any relief in the Court of Federal Claims, which can only provide remedies to the contracting parties.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment.

Aaron Gifford contributed to this report.