Haley Van Erem has been seeking justice for a long time
Fourteen years ago, an idealistic Florida State University law student saw something very wrong and, with the help of colleagues, set out to set it right. State authorities blocked her at every turn.
Now that she’s a far more seasoned lawyer, Haley Van Erem is doing the same thing again. But this time, it’s the Trump Administration that she’s tangling with.
Van Erem in 2012 was part of a project at FSU’s Public Interest Law Center that brought suit against Florida to try to get children with complex medical needs out of nursing homes and back into their homes with proper support. The children – who numbered more than 200 back then – were “medically fragile.” Some required 24/7 care that included ventilators.
Still, many of their caregivers wanted them home.
“The saddest part of all is not that these children have nowhere to go. That’s what a lot of people would assume,” Van Erem told the Florida Bar News. “A lot of families are asking for support and want their children at home. Our goal is to get these children back with their families, with adequate support.”
It took more than a decade of litigation, but in 2023 a federal court ruled that the state violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by institutionalizing the children. The court ordered Florida to ensure that the youngsters – then numbering about 140 –get access to needed services while at home and in their communities, as the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division reported.
As it happened, Van Erem was working at the time in that division, where she had served as a career DOJ attorney for nearly a decade. While there, she racked up a slew of honors, including Special Commendations in 2019 and 2023, Distinguished Service Awards in 2019, 2022, and 2023, and a Cooperative Achievement Award in 2017 for interagency work.
None of that seems surprising, in light of her work at FSU and her earlier days as a Phi Beta Kappa student at Arizona State University. As a junior studying social work, she won a grant to study in Spain. For years, Van Erem has been a proven achiever, as well as someone with a keen eye for right and wrong.
But her tenure in the once-distinguished Civil Rights Division was upended by Donald J. Trump and his minions at the department. And the demands put on Van Erem and her colleagues have led to an exceptional whistleblower complaint that claims there was no legal or factual basis for probes into antisemitism at Brown, Columbia and Harvard. Recall that those allegations have wreaked havoc at the schools.
Recall, too, that Brown and Columbia settled their disputes with the Trump Administration by agreeing to pay $50 million and $200 million, respectively, mainly because Trump had cut off far larger amounts of federal funding to the schools. Harvard has been fighting, however, and the Trump administration was ordered last year to reverse more than $2.6 billion funding cuts to the school, with a federal judge saying the government “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”
More recently, a different judge dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit that accused Harvard of turning a blind eye to harassment of Jewish students. This was a major setback in Trump’s war on academia.
As PBS reported, Van Erem’s complaint alleges that investigations into the schools were designed to strong-arm them into cutting deals for political purposes. Outcomes of the investigations were “predetermined, without regard to the evidence” in a “politically mandated effort” to extract money from schools through settlement demands and funding freezes under the pretext of rooting out antisemitism, the complaint alleges.
In other words, rather than undertake good-faith probes and charge offenses based on the facts, Justice’s lawyers were using the department as a cudgel to achieve Trump’s political end – humbling the schools.
The complaint makes for fascinating reading.
In March 2025, for instance, it says Van Erem and some of her colleagues were reassigned to a task force investigating alleged antisemitism in medical schools at Brown, Columbia, Cornell and Harvard. The lawyers got a memo informing them that the investigations were “based on a New York Post article that alleged anti-Semitic activities at numerous medical school commencement ceremonies.”
Some students, according to the newspaper, had shouted “Free Palestine” and worn Palestinian flags or keffiyehs at the graduation ceremonies – repulsive expressions, perhaps, but protected speech, according to the complaint. “It was not unheard of for news reporting coupled with additional evidence to lead the DOJ to initiate further scrutiny of potential statutory violations, but opening an investigation based on a single article was highly unusual,” the complaint notes.
Still, the lawyers expected rigorous investigation, the complaint says. Instead, they were told that the probe at Columbia – a particular bête noire for Trump — had widened to seek out antisemitism at the entire university.
The staff, it seemed, had found no evidence of liability at the medical schools but, together with the funding cuts, the DOJ was determined to pound the schools into settlements. The efforts “reflected a predetermined, outcome‑driven approach to enforcement rather than a fact‑based investigative process,” the complaint says, “… staff were encouraged to invert the standard sequence of investigation, compliance review, and legal analysis and instead work backward from desired settlement terms, including provisions not directly tied to substantiated Title VI anti‑harassment or antisemitism violations, to generate proposed findings that would support those terms.”
Title VI prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin in institutions receiving federal funds.
At Brown, in particular, Van Erem and her colleagues were told to interview Middle East Studies professors, particularly Muslims, to try to elicit antisemitic statements, according to the complaint. She and her colleagues felt it was an “attempt to intimidate those professors and was rooted in Islamophobic assumptions that Middle East Studies professors would harbor antisemitic viewpoints rather than any actual evidence of complaints about antisemitism.”
But, to the consternation of their superiors, Van Erem and her colleagues found insufficient evidence to support allegations of Title VI violations.
At Columbia, investigators found evidence of discrimination, but Van Erem and her colleagues argued the investigation was a rush job done before “adequate factual development and legal review were completed” and relied on allegations that “were unsupported, based on news reports or litigation filings, or that implicated protected First Amendment activity.”
DOJ’s representatives on the task force were given only hours to review claims that officials hoped to cite to justify an administration finding that the university had violated Jewish students’ civil rights, as The Washington Post noted. As the newspaper reported, in some cases the claims involved little more than activists’ expressions of support for Palestinians.
“My main concern is that a lot of these [examples] involve protected speech and this document should not imply that those incidents are the basis of a Title VI violations,” Van Erem wrote.
When the pressure from her supervisors persisted, the career DOJ lawyer decided her days in the department were over. Van Erem “was unwilling to be made vulnerable to further participation in politically motivated investigations unsupported by facts and contrary to law.” She quit on May 30, 2025.
As Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin put it in a letter to Harmeet Dhillon, an assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Rights Division, “your ‘investigation’ into antisemitism was fake, a pre-baked frame-up operation thoroughly political in nature.”
Raskin added that “the whole project was designed to harass professors and administrators at major universities, to curtail their freedom of speech and academic freedom, and to strip targeted institutions of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that they had already been awarded on the merits of their applications.”
Like many other career prosecutors who don’t toe the Trumpist line, Van Erem last fall moved into state prosecution. She signed on as a unit chief at the Office of the Attorney General for Maryland. And, on Aug. 17, she brought the complaint against the feds, with the help of lawyers at the Government Accountability Project. In it, she asks the inspector generals of the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services to investigate “without fear or favor” the abuses she has reported.
Will that request go anywhere? That seems difficult to imagine, now that the Justice Department under Todd Blanche appears overtly to be a vehicle for Trump to pursue institutions and individuals he dislikes. Still, the disclosure of Van Erem’s experiences sheds light on just how perverse the department has become.
It took years, but Van Erem prevailed in Florida. That may again happen in D.C., though it may require that someone new occupy the White House and that the Department of Justice be led by someone independent, fair-minded and truthful — in other words, someone as interested in justice as Van Erem is.
