Trump brings four more states into battle over tuition breaks for immigrants

Filed 1h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

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Evil March

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Kidfly182 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

The Justice Department sued Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington Thursday over laws letting students without permanent legal status pay in-state tuition, arguing the statutes illegally favor noncitizens over U.S. citizens. Officials cite an estimate that over 3,600 noncitizens could qualify in Arizona alone, with ASU students reportedly receiving about $10.5 million in reduced tuition last year.

Each state's law was drafted around the same technical loophole — tying eligibility to where a student attended high school rather than current residency — a workaround the DOJ says still violates federal preemption law. The lawsuits bring the total number of states sued over similar statutes to 21, with mixed results so far: wins in Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Illinois, a loss in Minnesota.

Lawsuits against eleven more states remain pending, meaning the federal government's tuition-litigation portfolio is now larger than some state universities' endowments.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Officials describe this as 'a simple matter of federal law,' which is one way to describe suing 21 states over statutes some have had on the books for two decades without apparent incident. If it's really this simple, it's strange it took this many lawsuits to discover it.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Evil March · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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