Trump administration officials ignored the recommendations of their own investigators as they pushed to find civil rights violations at three Ivy League universities, according to a whistle-blower complaint released Tuesday.

The Aug. 17 account came from a former Department of Justice civil rights lawyer, Haley Van Erem, and colleagues whose names were redacted, who said they were assigned in 2025 to an administration task force on antisemitism. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released the account on Tuesday.

In the complaint, the lawyers accuse administration officials of using campus antisemitism as a pretext to cut federal grants to pressure Brown, Columbia and Harvard. Trump officials had “a predetermined, outcome‑driven approach to enforcement rather than a fact‑based investigative process,” it said, while investigators said they did not have the evidence to conclude the schools had broken the law.

Under pressure from the government, two of the schools, Brown and Columbia, agreed to settlements with the administration. Harvard has so far prevailed in a series of court fights against the government and has not reached a settlement with the government.

The complaint says that when Ms. Van Erem and others “raised issues with the lack of a factual basis” to establish that the schools had broken the law, “their disagreements were sidelined or they faced reprimands.”

The White House referred a request for comment to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Justice Department.

Ms. Van Erem had been temporarily assigned to the health department, which oversees some of the largest research funding streams to universities, during the period described in her account. The department did not immediately respond to an inquiry on Tuesday.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said by email: “While at the D.O.J., Ms. Haley Van Erem did not work on university investigations. And for all matters, the department stands behind the integrity of these investigations.”

In the case of Brown, investigators, including Ms. Van Erem, were told in April 2025 of a plan to “systematically interview Middle East studies professors, particularly Muslim faculty” to see if they would say anything that could be labeled antisemitic, the document states.

Later that month, the lawyers concluded that the investigation into Brown did not find a violation of Title VI, which prohibits discrimination by institutions that receive federal money.

Ms. Van Erem suggested sending Brown a “closure letter reflecting the team’s conclusion that there were no Title VI violations at Brown, noting such action might restore credibility to the investigations,” the complaint states. But Daniel Shieh, a top official in the health department’s civil rights office, said that administration “higher ups” would not accept closing the investigation because “everything is sequenced,” according to Ms. Van Erem’s account.

Ms. Van Erem took that to mean that the investigations were being coordinated based on politics, not the law, the complaint says.

Mr. Shieh did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last July, as part of a settlement with the government, Brown agreed to put $50 million toward work force development. It also agreed to a set of policies that more closely aligned the university with the Trump administration’s ideology, including around gender, and to a three-year arrangement for the government to monitor its compliance.

A spokesman for Brown, Brian Clark, said by email that the university had not been told it had violated the law.

“Even so,” he said, “a freeze on funding for the university’s federally sponsored medical and health sciences research had posed enormous challenges for Brown’s research mission and financial sustainability.”

Also in April 2025, according to the complaint, Sean Keveney, who was then the health department’s acting general counsel, told Ms. Van Erem that the White House had ordered the department to pull grants from Harvard. He showed her proposed settlement terms for Harvard, which included “installing a provost to oversee curriculum, ending D.E.I. programs, placing endowment money in trusts the government could seize and investing in programs in Israel,” the complaint states.

Mr. Keveney later sent demands to Harvard, whose leaders found them so over the top that the university decided to sue. People familiar with the episode later claimed the demands were sent by mistake. The university did not comment on Tuesday.

Democrats were quick to assail the administration over Ms. Van Erem’s account. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the House Judiciary Committee’s ranking member, called the administration’s antisemitism actions “a prebaked frame-up operation.”

In a 2025 ruling for Harvard, a federal judge in Boston, Allison D. Burroughs, came to a similar conclusion, writing that the administration’s focus on antisemitism at the university was at best “arbitrary and, at worst, pretextual.”

After Judge Burroughs ruled in favor of Harvard in the university’s bid to restore grants — a case that is now before a federal appeals court — the Trump administration this year filed an antisemitism lawsuit against the university. Another federal judge in Boston dismissed that suit this month.

Ms. Van Erem’s accusations align closely with the accounts of others familiar with the Trump administration’s internal debates about universities last year. The New York Times reported this year that early in Mr. Trump’s second term, for example, the Justice Department created a group to investigate the University of California system.

The group was given a month to develop enough evidence to bring accusations of workplace discrimination inside the 10-campus system. One lawyer involved in the matter last year, Ejaz Baluch Jr., told The Times that the group was “only told to investigate cases that were in blue states, and cases or investigations involving red states or that didn’t involve perceived political enemies of the administration never moved forward.”

Federal officials have offered an array of explanations for their pressure campaigns against schools. In some instances, they have argued that the government had the authority to set priorities — and that funneling money to schools that they insisted were hubs of antisemitism was not one of them.

At other moments, they contended that the administration wanted federal research money to be spread through higher education more equally, not directed to the country’s wealthiest schools. And Mr. Trump himself has sometimes been eager to joust with universities, directly steering the terms of engagement between his administration and a handful of universities.

Most notably, Mr. Trump personally had a hand in devising the financial terms in settlement proposals to Columbia, Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles. (Among those, only Columbia reached a settlement. The university declined to comment on Tuesday.)

Other parts of the federal government have also acknowledged political considerations in their moves against academic researchers. The Energy Department acknowledged in a court filing last month, for instance, that it had moved to end some grants “solely” because the recipients were in states that had voted for Kamala Harris in 2024.