The Justice Department sued Virginia for granting in-state tuition to undocumented students, saying the policy violated federal law by favoring those students over citizens who live outside Virginia and don’t qualify for in-state benefits.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in the Eastern District of Virginia, asks a federal judge to bar the state from enforcing the policy, saying it “is not only wrong, but illegal.”
“In Virginia and nationwide, schools cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi in a news release. “This Department of Justice will not tolerate American students being treated like second-class citizens in their own country.”
Virginia is the seventh state to be sued by the Justice Department over similar policies across the country. Currently, 22 states and the District of Columbia have laws or policies that grant in-state tuition to undocumented students.
In Virginia, any student, regardless of legal status, who attends two years of high school in Virginia and who paid, or whose parents paid, state income taxes, among other requirements, can receive in-state tuition and other aid. The law was passed in 2020, when Ralph Northam (D) was Virginia’s governor.
In Republican-led states such as Texas and Oklahoma, state attorneys general made settlement agreements with the Trump administration this summer that struck down policies providing in-state tuition to undocumented students. The resolutions were approved by local federal judges.
In Texas, that deal was cemented and approved by the court within six hours of the Justice Department’s suit, drawing complaints from students and activists that they were denied a meaningful opportunity to oppose the effort.
Both of those settlement agreements remain under review by appellate courts. The department’s efforts to obtain similar judgments eliminating in-state tuition policies in Kentucky, Illinois, Minnesota and California remain pending in district courts.
An estimated 510,000 undocumented students attend institutions of higher education across the country, including roughly 13,000 in Virginia, according to the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, an advocacy group made up of U.S. college and university leaders.
Costs at top Virginia universities can vary by tens of thousands of dollars for in-state and out-of-state tuition. At the University of Virginia, for example, the cost of in-state undergraduate tuition for a first-year student ranges from roughly $16,500 to $27,000 for the 2025-2026 academic year. The cost to out-of-state students can exceed $66,000.
It was not immediately clear how the state of Virginia will respond. Virginia Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera and the offices of outgoing Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares, both Republicans, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. A spokesperson for Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger (D) also did not respond to a request for comment.
State Sen. Jennifer B. Boysko (D), who was one of the co-sponsors of the legislation to allow students access to in-state tuition, said it aimed to stabilize Virginia’s economic future by educating kids who could work in high-demand jobs in health care, education and technology.
“That is a good thing for our economy and society — to have educated people who are in Virginia,” she said. “These are some of the hardest working kids, and I believe they deserve access to a degree.”
She said she hopes Spanberger will stand up to the Trump administration and defend the policy once she takes office Jan. 17.
Sookyung Oh, the executive director of the Asian American advocacy group Hamkae Center, said her organization helped draft the original bill to make sure it complied with a federal code. That code requires that if a noncitizen is granted a postsecondary educational benefit on the basis of residency, then a U.S. citizen must also be granted that same benefit.
Oh argued that policies like Virginia’s — which grants in-state tuition not based on residency but based on high school attendance, among other requirements — do not preclude a citizen in another state from qualifying for in-state tuition.
“This is a policy that benefits all students,” she said.
Other states have raised similar arguments in court, though no federal judges have ruled on this question yet.
The Justice Department argued in its complaint that, following President Donald Trump’s executive orders to limit benefits for undocumented immigrants, any aid given to those immigrants must also be available to citizens, regardless of where they live. Department lawyers argued the policy does not do that, and is therefore discriminatory.
Department lawyers asked the court to issue a permanent injunction that would bar the state, including future leaders, from granting the benefits.
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