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A chaotic situation unfolded on Tuesday night in Los Angeles as far-left activists and students disrupted and chastised a Department of Homeland Security attorney who was speaking to law students at a conservative group’s event at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
The incident took place at a speech hosted by the Federalist Society’s UCLA chapter, where James Percival, general counsel of the DHS, was speaking to law students. Over 150 protesters gathered outside the event chanting criticisms of the Trump administration, including “No ICE, No KKK, No Fascist U.S.A.”
Inside the event, students booed Percival throughout his talk, and many held profane signs while he spoke. One sign read, “F— you loser.” The students also set off different sounds on their phones as part of the disruption, and at different points, yelled out the word “Nazi.”
The event culminated in a question and answer session, for which most of the disruptors walked out in protest.
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Royce Hall on the UCLA campus is shown in an early morning view. A San Francisco Bay Area man faces federal charges for an elaborate scheme to steal historical Chinese documents from the University of California Los Angeles library. (iStock)
“Yesterday, DHS General Counsel James Percival came to UCLA School of Law for a good-faith academic discussion and was met with personal attacks, repeated interruptions, and organized disruption that prevented him from speaking,” UCLA FedSoc chapter president Matthew Weinberg told Digital.
“As President of the UCLA Law Federalist Society and the event organizer, I saw students who came to hear and question a senior federal official denied that opportunity. If this is what it looks like for conservative law students trying to host a speaker at an American law school in 2026, we are not staying silent about it.”
After the event was announced, left-wing campus groups circulated posts and online petitions containing rhetoric described as “threatening.” One of those radical leftist groups was By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), which on its website calls for a “militant new civil rights and immigrant rights movement,” posted a flyer on Instagram promoting a picketing event outside the law school.
“UCLA must not give representatives of ICE and the Trump Administration a base to organize Trump’s campaign of racist ethnic cleansing of the U.S. and the Middle East,” the flyer said.
“Stop the fascist takeover of the American federal government! Stop the Trump police state!” the caption on the social media post said.
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Janss Steps on the UCLA campus in Los Angeles on Oct. 20, 2017. (MichaelGordon1/Getty Images)
The UCLE Latine Law Students Association also stoked hysteria around the event.
“Many students at UCLA and UCLA Law have been impacted by ICE’s practice of stalking, kidnapping, and profiling individuals whom they suspect to be in the United States without authorization, primarily based on ethnicity,” the group said, later adding that inviting Percival to speak “utterly disregards the safety of our undocumented students and minimizes the great harm and trauma that has been inflicted on our communities over the decades.”
“By giving Mr. Percival a platform, The Federalist Society and UCLA Law are legitimizing and normalizing racially discriminatory policies that are actively harming both UCLA students and our broader community,” the group said.
Video of the incident quickly made waves on social media after it was posted by recent UCLA law school graduate Yitzy Frankel and even got the attention of a top Justice Department official.
“Oh, @UCLA,” DOJ assistant attorney general for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon posted on X. “… Adding To The List …. And it’s the wrong list.”
“Some little punks tried this when I went to speak at UVA Law FedSoc, but school security cooperated with me in shutting down disruption during Q&A,” Dhillon added in another post. “Conservative campus speakers must sadly now expect this nonsense, and prepare accordingly.”
“When you don’t discipline this kind of behavior you get more of it,” Manhattan Institute’s Ilya Shapiro posted on X. “This isn’t hard.”
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UCLA students walk out of conservative speaker’s event (Yitzy Frankel and Matthew Weinberg)
“So much for the ‘diversity of thought’ that the university says it ‘values,’” Judicial Network President Carrie Severino posted on X. “That tolerance doesn’t extend to conservative legal arguments. It’s hard to imagine these students will be committed to the rule of law and upholding judicial independence.”
Digital reached out to UCLA for comment.
The incident highlights an ongoing trend of far-left students and activists disrupting conservative events and harassing conservative students on college campuses.
“FIRE’s 2026 college free speech survey shows that 91% of students now self-censor at least some of the time in conversations with classmates,” contributor William J. Bennett wrote in a recent op-ed discussing how conservatives don’t feel comfortable expressing themselves on college campuses. “Israel and Palestine are the most feared topics for open dissent, just ahead of abortion and transgender rights. At two prominent universities, 88% of students now pretend to be more progressive than they really are.”
