BERKELEY — The Trump administration is wading into the ongoing legal battle between UC Berkeley and conservative students who say the school is stepping on their right to free speech.

On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in the case in support of the students, agreeing that their complaint “adequately pleads that the university’s speech restrictions violate the First Amendment.”

“This Department of Justice will not stand by idly while public universities violate students’ constitutional rights,” Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand said in a statement.

It’s not the first time the administration has made a show of trying to stick it to what is often identified as one of the nation’s most liberal universities. Attorney General Jeff Sessions sympathized during a September talk at Georgetown University with the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who spoke at Cal last year, saying “no one fainted.” In a February 2017 tweet, President Donald Trump appeared to threaten to pull funding from the university, writing, “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”

The comments stem from a series of events last year that thrust UC Berkeley into the center of a national debate over free speech. Conservative student groups — the Berkeley College Republicans and Young America’s Foundation — invited controversial right-wing speakers, including Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter, to speak on campus. The talks were ultimately canceled over security concerns and, in Yiannopoulos’ case, violent protests.

The student groups sued, saying UC Berkeley deliberately limited conservative free speech. A judge dismissed the original suit but allowed the students to submit an amended complaint.

The school, for its part, has denied the groups’ claims and asked that the suit be dismissed.

“The allegations made by the plaintiffs in this lawsuit are unfounded,” said Cal spokesman Dan Mogulof on Thursday. “Berkeley does not discriminate against speakers invited by student organizations based upon viewpoint. The campus is committed to ensuring that student groups may hold events with speakers of their choosing, and it has expended significant resources to allow events to go forward without compromising the safety or security of the campus. This suit has already been dismissed by the Court once. The campus will continue to vigorously defend itself against these allegations.”

But in a Fox News column published Thursday, Brand wrote, “When public universities restrict speech, it has constitutional implications as well. The First Amendment prevents government institutions from imposing speech restraints such as arduous permitting restrictions or arbitrary curfews, particularly if the school discriminates against certain viewpoints. Yet this is precisely what many university speech policies do.”

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Why some Asian Americans are on the front lines of the campaign against affirmative action UC Berkeley “imposes a curfew, security measures, and location restrictions for events that administrators decide are likely to ‘interfer[e] with other campus functions or activities,'” she wrote. “It doesn’t require much creativity to turn this policy into a heckler’s veto. If you disagree with a speaker about to visit campus, simply declare his views offensive and threaten to riot, and the speaker will be sidelined.”

UC Berkeley is not alone in facing ire from the Trump administration over free speech. Under Sessions, the Department of Justice has also filed statements of interest in free speech cases involving Georgia Gwinnett College and Los Angeles Pierce College.

“The US Department of Justice rightly recognizes that there are serious problems at UC Berkeley, and this is a reminder from the DOJ to UC Berkeley that it still has a lot to learn about the First Amendment,” Spencer Brown, spokesman for the Young America’s Foundation, said in a statement. “It’s incredible to see the United States government reinforcing in its [statement of interest] what YAF has said for months: Berkeley’s high-profile speaker policy and major events policy are ‘prior restraints on protected speech that invite viewpoint discrimination.'”