Texas Ends In-State Tuition for Undocumented Students

Thousands of undocumented students in Texas no longer have access to in-state tuition. The U.S. Department of Justice sued the state on Wednesday over its policy of allowing undocumented students to pay in-state tuition at public universities. Within hours, Texas sided with the Justice Department, and U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor granted a permanent injunction, quashing the policy.

Texas attorney general Ken Paxton celebrated the swift ruling.

“Today, I entered a joint motion along with the Trump Administration opposing a law that unconstitutionally and unlawfully gave benefits to illegal aliens that were not available to American citizens,” Paxton said in a statement. “Ending this discriminatory and un-American provision is a major victory for Texas.”

Texas became the first state to permit in-state tuition benefits to undocumented students in 2001, when former governor Rick Perry, a Republican, signed the Texas Dream Act into law. Now 23 states have similar laws in place. (Florida also had such a policy until state lawmakers eliminated it earlier this year.) The goal of such laws is to help young people who grew up in these states afford college, regardless of their citizenship status.

In Texas, undocumented students qualified for in-state tuition if they met certain eligibility criteria, including graduating from a Texas high school, residing in Texas for at least three years prior and signing an affidavit promising to apply for permanent residency status. Under the state law, U.S. citizens could take advantage of in-state tuition as long as they, or a parent, lived in Texas at least a year before enrolling in college.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit argued the Texas law breached federal law by offering undocumented students tuition benefits “denied to out-of-state U.S. citizens.” It referenced a federal statutory provision that says that undocumented people can’t receive higher ed benefits unless citizens are also eligible.

“The Justice Department will relentlessly fight to vindicate federal law and ensure that U.S. citizens are not treated like second-class citizens anywhere in the country,” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in an announcement about the lawsuit Wednesday.

‘Fundamentally Flawed’

Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, advocates for undocumented students slammed the move.

Miriam Feldblum, president and CEO of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, described the lawsuit as “fundamentally flawed" and said it misrepresented these in-state tuition laws. She emphasized that the policies also opened up in-state tuition benefits to citizens living in the state who otherwise wouldn’t be able to pay in-state tuition rates.

“To suggest that undocumented students are receiving benefits denied to citizens is false and misleading,” she said. “Efforts to cast these policies as preferential treatment ignore the reality that they promote fairness and recognize students’ deep ties to their communities.”

Eric Holguin, Texas state director at UnidosUS, a Latino civil rights organization, said that 92 percent of the Texas students who have benefited from in-state tuition are citizens.

“The DOJ is making the argument that whatever benefits are offered to undocumented students have to also be offered to U.S. citizens, and clearly that’s already happening,” he said.

Pacheco also noted that on average, TheDream.US scholarship recipients who benefited from Texas in-state tuition rates came to the state at age 4.

They grew up in Texas, attended Texas K–12 schools and “thanks to the Texas Dream Act, have studied and succeeded on Texas college campuses, with hundreds now putting their degrees to work as teachers, nurses, engineers, and Fortune 500 employees in Texas,” she said in a statement.

But the benefits conferred by the Texas Dream Act are now gone.

The Bigger Picture

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration took aim at in-state tuition benefits for noncitizens. In April, Trump issued an executive order, cited in the lawsuit, that sought to crack down on sanctuary cities. The order commanded the attorney general to “take appropriate action to stop the enforcement” of state and local laws unlawfully “favoring aliens over any groups of American citizens”—including laws that offer in-state tuition rates “to aliens but not to out-of-State American citizens.”

Since the presidential election in November, lawmakers in some states—including Massachusetts, Minnesota and Texas—have also introduced legislation to remove in-state tuition for undocumented students. But so far, Florida has been the only state to do away with the policy. A Texas Senate bill sought to repeal in-state tuition benefits for undocumented students, but it failed to advance to the Senate floor. A House bill that would have required undocumented students to prove they applied for permanent residency to receive in-state tuition benefits also died in committee, The Texas Tribune reported.

The law has also been challenged in court before. The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2023 that the University of North Texas could charge out-of-state students higher rates than undocumented students living in the state, but the court also argued there could be “valid preemption challenges to Texas’ scheme,” leaving the door open for further challenges.

Prior to the judge’s ruling, Holguin worried that the Justice Department chose Texas because it was an “easy target to win,” given that some Republican lawmakers wanted to end the law anyway. He suspected it wasn’t a coincidence that the feds picked up where Texas state lawmakers left off, he said.

In an interview before the permanent injunction, Ahilan Arulanantham, professor from practice at the UCLA School of Law and co-director of the law school’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, said he didn’t believe a legal ruling in the Justice Department’s favor would necessarily affect other states, such as California, with similar laws. He said Texas used a residency criterion to decide eligibility for in-state tuition, an approach more vulnerable to legal challenges than some of the criteria other states use.

But even if other states go unscathed, losing in-state tuition benefits is “extraordinarily significant” for the “massive” undocumented population in Texas, he said.

After California, Texas enrolls the second most undocumented students of any state, with 57,000 enrolled in Texas colleges and universities, according to the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.

“This would make higher education unaffordable for thousands and thousands of young Texans who have been through the public school system in Texas,” Arulanantham said. “Texas has a huge number of long-term undocumented youth who can either be integrated into the state economy or be shut out of higher education.”