The Trump administration sued Texas on Wednesday over a two decade-old law that offers undocumented residents of the state the same discounted tuition as other in-state college applicants, arguing that the measure violates federal immigration law.
The lawsuit came as a surprise given that the Republican-dominated state has been more than willing to cooperate with the Trump administration on its strict approach to immigration enforcement. The case was filed in the Northern District of Texas and carried a title more familiar to legal fights over immigration during the Biden administration: United States of America v. State of Texas.
“Under federal law, schools cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement, pledging that the Justice Department would “ensure that U.S. citizens are not treated like second-class citizens.”
How or whether Texas chooses to defend the law, the Texas Dream Act of 2001, is still uncertain. The state’s Republican governor at the time, Rick Perry, championed the law and said during his failed 2012 presidential run that those who opposed it did not “have a heart.”
The party has moved considerably to the right on immigration since then. It now falls to Texas’ hard-line conservative attorney general, Ken Paxton, to represent the state in the case, and it was not clear on Wednesday what his approach would be.
Mr. Paxton is currently locked in a fierce campaign to unseat Senator John Cornyn in the state’s Republican primary next year, based in large part on the attorney general’s aggressive enforcement of immigration laws.
Mr. Paxton’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the suit.
Texas was the first state in the nation to extend in-state tuition benefits to undocumented students, according to the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant rights nonprofit. The savings can be substantial. At the University of Texas’ flagship campus in Austin, in-state students pay a minimum of about $10,800 for tuition a year, while the minimum cost for out-of-state student is about $40,500.
Now nearly half the states offer undocumented applicants similar deals, but they are mostly led by Democrats, according to the Higher Ed Immigration Portal, which gathers education data. In Texas, there are tens of thousands of undocumented students in higher education, and many of them were brought into the country as young children and attended American public schools, according to the group’s data.
In April, President Trump took aim at such students with an executive order targeting laws “that provide in-state higher education tuition to aliens but not to out-of-state American citizens.”
The order directed Ms. Bondi to “identify and take appropriate action to stop the enforcement” of such laws. The action appeared aimed at blue states such as California.
Now Texas is in the cross hairs.
The state’s Republican lawmakers had considered changing the law during this year’s legislative session, which ended on Monday. A bill introduced in the State Senate by a Houston-area Republican, Mayes Middleton, would have made undocumented students ineligible for in-state tuition, but it never received a full vote. A similar measure also failed in the State House.
“The Texas House and Senate declined to repeal the Texas Dream Act this session because even state lawmakers recognized how out of touch that would be,” State Representative Ramón Romero Jr., a Democrat and the chairman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, said in a statement. “Now Donald Trump is pushing the issue even further by suing Texas for giving these students a fair shot.”
Mr. Perry did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but in a 2014 interview he said it was in the best interest of the state of Texas “to give these young people the opportunity to be givers rather than takers, to be a constructive part of this society.”
The law applies to undocumented students who have finished three years of high school in Texas and have lived in the state for the year before enrolling in a public college or university. The students must also sign an affidavit saying they intend to apply for permanent residency as soon as they are able.
The Justice Department argues, in its complaint, that a federal immigration law from 1996 restricts the state’s authority to grant that kind of benefit to “illegal aliens.”
The Texas law recently survived a case in federal court brought by a conservative group, Young Conservatives of Texas Foundation, against administrators at the University of North Texas over the school’s tuition policy.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit dismissed the case in 2023, but focused its attention on the validity of charging out-of-state students more than in-state students, not on whether the state could grant in-state tuition to undocumented students.
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
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