The state of Tennessee and the group that successfully sued Harvard to stop race-conscious college admissions is challenging a federal program that provides tens of millions of dollars a year to colleges that serve Hispanic students.
The lawsuit, brought by Students for Fair Admissions, targets a program to support so-called Hispanic Serving Institutions, which include schools that meet a threshold of 25 percent Hispanic enrollment. The complaint says the program violates state and federal anti-discrimination laws and the Constitution because it provides a benefit — additional federal funding — to those schools.
All public institutions of higher learning in Tennessee serve Hispanic and low-income students, the lawsuit says, yet none of them qualify for these grants because their Hispanic enrollment is below 25 percent.
“The H.S.I. program does not pursue the general welfare,” says the complaint, which was filed in federal court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. “It pursues the welfare of one ethnic group at the expense of everyone else, including other Hispanic students whose schools miss an arbitrary ethnic cutoff.”
The lawsuit is part of a volley of challenges in recent years against schools and programs, including scholarships and internships, that use racial or ethnic criteria. Conservative activists have filed multiple lawsuits since the Supreme Court effectively struck down affirmative action college admissions in 2023, in litigation brought by Students for Fair Admissions. The targets of litigation often close the program rather than devote the substantial resources needed to defend it in court.
A group called the American Alliance for Equal Rights has filed at least 10 lawsuits alleging discrimination in various public and private programs, including the nonprofit, venture capital and legal arenas.
The Hispanic-Serving Institutions program is intended to support Hispanic and other low-income students, according to the lawsuit, and can be spent on needs like laboratory equipment, libraries, tutoring and counseling.
In 2024, the federal government appropriated about $229 million for Hispanic Serving Institutions, according to the Department of Education. Of that, $28 million went to 49 applicants, including Riverside Community College in California and Nassau Community College in New York.
The program was created out of concern that Latino students were concentrated in colleges and universities that did not receive much funding from the government, and where the outcomes were not good, according to a 2021 report by the Postsecondary National Policy Institute, a higher education policy group.
“These institutions are ideally enrolling large numbers of low-income students regardless of race, and they are under-resourced,” said Emmanual Guillory, the senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education.
“This is a program that has been supported by Republicans and Democrats in the past,” he said. “And this is a program that is not being proposed to be eliminated by the Trump administration.”
In a statement, Jonathan Skrmetti, the attorney general of Tennessee, said that “a federal grant system that openly discriminates against students based on ethnicity isn’t just wrong and un-American, it’s unconstitutional.”
The lawsuit names the U.S. Education Department and the secretary of education, Linda McMahon, as defendants. It is unclear if the federal government would try to fight it in court, since the Trump administration is ideologically aligned with the premise of the litigation.
The Trump administration, for example, has cited the Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action as a justification for some of its policy efforts to restrict diversity and equity programs — a priority, both in higher education and in K-12 schools.
States with large numbers of Hispanic-serving institutions, like California, New York and Illinois, could intervene to try to preserve the program, however.
The Education Department did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The lawsuit does not have implications for historically Black colleges and universities, because any special funding for those schools is tied to their historical status, not the number of Black students they currently enroll, according to Edward Blum, the conservative activist behind Students for Fair Admissions.
“The H.S.I. program ties funding not to history,” Mr. Blum said, “but to the number of Hispanic students currently on campus.”
Anemona Hartocollis is a national reporter for The Times, covering higher education.
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