The A. Ray Olpin Student Union building on the University of Utah campus in Salt Lake City is pictured on Saturday, Aug. 23, 2025. Utah is one of the states the Trump administration is suing for offering in-state tuition regardless of immigration status. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)WASHINGTON — Leading immigration advocates and experts sounded the alarm Wednesday on the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to undo state laws allowing some immigrants to pay in-state college tuition in the states where they reside.
The U.S. Department of Justice has sued 24 states, Washington, D.C., and the University of Delaware since President Donald Trump retook office over laws or policies that allow noncitizen students who meet certain requirements access to in-state tuition, regardless of their immigration status.
The lawsuits are part of a larger push from the administration to curb any benefits that could extend to immigrants more broadly.
Leaders of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration and TheDream.US defended the state laws during a virtual press conference, while warning of the setbacks noncitizen students face to accessing affordable higher education when these policies are struck down.
The groups also released a joint report Wednesday charting the landscape of such laws and the DOJ’s legal challenges against the policies.
The administration’s challenges “limit opportunities for thousands of students and undermine the social and economic well-being of communities across the country,” said Miriam Feldblum, president and CEO of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization.
“When access to in-state tuition is taken away, many undocumented students cannot bridge the gap between in-state and out-of-state rates,” Feldblum added.
Gaby Pacheco, president and CEO of TheDream.US, called the Trump administration’s efforts “coordinated assaults on tuition equity.”
They are “just one part of a larger pattern of legal and policy barriers and restrictions being put in place that threatens Dreamers and immigrants’ educational opportunities, their stability, their safety and their futures,” she said.
TheDream.US grants scholarships to immigrant youth, including individuals under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, who are also known as Dreamers.
DACA is intended to help people brought into the country without legal documentation as children. The program, created in 2012, protects participants from deportation and allows them to receive work permits and obtain driver’s licenses.
Six state laws blocked
In six of the lawsuits the DOJ filed — targeting Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas — courts have already struck down the laws.
But in a blow to the administration’s efforts against Virginia’s in-state tuition policies, a federal judge earlier this week scrapped the DOJ’s challenge, upholding the Virginia law.
Lawsuits are also pending in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont and Washington state.
Debate over 1996 law
The DOJ’s challenges center on the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which bars a state from offering in-state tuition benefits to people not lawfully present in the country if that same benefit is not granted to U.S. citizens from another state.
Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate of the DOJ’s Civil Division has noted that “colleges cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens” and that the agency “will not tolerate American students being treated like second-class citizens in their own country.”
Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of MALDEF, which has sought to intervene on behalf of affected students in cases targeting the laws, described “extraordinary” aspects of the DOJ’s “litigation campaign,” including that “the administration uses very sharp tactics to attempt to prevent anyone from coming in to defend the state tuition-equity laws.”
Saenz also pointed out that all of the state tuition-equity policies across the country were enacted after the 1996 law was enacted.
“What that means is that they are using a provision that was on the books when all of these legislators acted to create laws like the Texas Dream Act,” Saenz said, pointing to the Lone Star State’s 2001 law — the first of its kind in the country — that has since been blocked.
He added that “no administration prior to this one has ever gone to court contending that that 1996 law somehow renders these tuition-equity laws passed beginning in 2001 unconstitutional or preempted.”
