The federal government moved on multiple fronts Wednesday to end state programs that let some undocumented students pay in-state college tuition, filing four new lawsuits and securing a permanent injunction from a federal judge in Kansas.
The Department of Justice sued Hawaii, Arkansas, Utah, and the District of Columbia on September 10, arguing that each jurisdiction’s in-state tuition statute unlawfully offers a taxpayer-funded college benefit to unlawfully present immigrants that is not equally available to United States citizens who live in other states. The four filings bring the number of states the department has sued on that theory to at least 25 in a nationwide campaign that began earlier this year.
The same day, U.S. District Judge Holly Teeter of the District of Kansas issued a permanent injunction striking down KSA 76-731a, a bipartisan Kansas law adopted in 2004 that let community college and university students who were brought to the country as children, completed a Kansas high school education, and pledged to seek citizenship pay the in-state tuition rate. The injunction took effect immediately and permanently forbids future use of the tuition benefit.
Judge Teeter, a Trump nominee, ruled that the Kansas statute was preempted by federal law because it granted a postsecondary education benefit to an unlawfully present person based on a state residency determination without making the same benefit generally available to United States citizens and nationals regardless of where they lived. The Department of Justice, which challenged the law and endorsed a consent decree ending it, said it had prevailed on the same legal theory in Texas, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Nebraska.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, a longstanding opponent of the tuition statute, welcomed the ruling. Democratic Governor Laura Kelly’s office criticized the decision. Ryan Kriegshauser, the United States Attorney for the District of Kansas, said the injunction implemented federal immigration law as written and closed a program that treated Kansas taxpayers unequally.
The department’s theory rests on a 1996 federal statute, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which prohibits states from providing a postsecondary education benefit to an unlawfully present alien on the basis of state residency unless the same benefit is offered to any United States citizen or national. State legislatures in Kansas, Texas, and roughly 20 other states enacted their in-state tuition laws before or shortly after that statute took effect, and the current administration has taken the position that the state laws are incompatible with the federal one and must be repealed or enjoined.
The court injunctions and lawsuits raise immediate operating questions for public colleges and universities that have long enrolled affected students at in-state rates. Kansas Reflector reported that campus officials in the state were still working out how to implement the ruling in the middle of the fall semester. In the four newly sued jurisdictions, university systems will now face similar uncertainty as the DOJ actions move through district court, with policy consequences for tuition, financial aid, and enrollment planning across the affected campuses.
