The Trump administration sued D.C. and three states last week to try to invalidate their policies allowing in-state tuition for undocumented college students. It was a lamentable milestone: Since President Donald Trump returned to office last year, his administration has now sued every jurisdiction that offered such assistance.
This is part of a broader campaign against “dreamers,” the young immigrants who were brought into the United States illegally as children. Many remember no other country as home. College degrees are particularly important for this cohort: They can lead to jobs at businesses willing to sponsor the necessary paperwork for them to come out of the shadows.
Taking away in-state tuition rates, however, risks crushing that dream by making higher education unaffordable. In Utah, one of the states sued by the administration last week, the flagship University of Utah charges nonresident students $32,932, more than triple the rate for residents.
The Trump administration has already succeeded in ending in-state tuition in a handful of states. Its first target was Texas, which the Justice Department sued last year in federal court. Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) eagerly entered into a consent decree with the federal government to kill the law, which had been in place for more than two decades.
Similar tactics proved successful in Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska and Oklahoma. Florida’s legislature repealed its policy last year, bringing the total number of immigrant students who lost access to in-state tuition to more than 180,000. If the administration prevails in all of its latest lawsuits, an additional 200,000 or more students will see their tuition skyrocket.
The Justice Department criticizes these state laws as “placing illegal aliens over American citizens” and describes them as “discrimination.” This is ludicrous. In-state tuition is available to U.S. citizens — so long as they live in that state. Making it available to noncitizens doesn’t discriminate against out-of-state students because, by definition, those students would never be eligible.
The administration has also argued that these laws violate a 1996 federal statute barring states from granting higher education benefits to undocumented students “on the basis of residency” unless those benefits are also available to out-of-state citizens. But many states do not tie in-state tuition to where students live; rather, they base it on whether the student attended or graduated from high school in the state.
That was a clever maneuver to skirt federal restrictions, but even if one agrees with the administration’s legal argument, it’s much harder to justify ripping away students’ financial support to go to college. Why shouldn’t young dreamers who attended high school in a state, and whose families paid state taxes, have the same access to higher education as their peers?
Not long ago, many Republicans regarded these policies as a win-win, enabling these young adults to put down roots and contribute to the economy. Ending the policies is America’s loss.
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