The Justice Department has filed lawsuits against Hawaii, Arkansas, Utah, and the District of Columbia over policies granting in-state college tuition to illegal immigrants, expanding a legal campaign that now spans 25 cases nationwide.
Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. said the department has now challenged every state with a policy covered by its legal theory. The four new suits bring the DOJ's total to 25 active cases, each built on the same federal statute: Section 505 of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, the law Congress passed nearly three decades ago to prevent states from offering postsecondary education benefits to people in the country illegally unless every American citizen qualifies for the same deal regardless of residency.
The DOJ's position is straightforward. Federal law bars states from making people who are not lawfully present eligible for college tuition discounts based on state residency, unless U.S. citizens from any state can claim the same benefit. Dozens of states set up programs that did exactly what the statute forbids, and for years no administration forced the issue. Now the lawsuits are landing, and the results are tilting heavily in the federal government's favor.
Courts have sided with the DOJ in six of the cases filed so far. Federal judges in Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Illinois, and Kansas have all issued orders blocking the challenged tuition policies. The Fifth Circuit's ruling ending Texas in-state tuition for illegal immigrants marked one of the DOJ's most significant victories in the campaign.
Two of those outcomes stand out for their finality.
In Nebraska, a federal judge permanently barred the state from enforcing provisions that granted in-state tuition and state-funded scholarships to students not lawfully present. The ruling came in June after the state and federal governments agreed to a consent judgment, meaning Nebraska chose not to fight.
Illinois put up more resistance but lost anyway. A federal judge ruled in July that the state's in-state tuition law was unconstitutional and blocked related financial-aid provisions. The state let the deadline pass without filing an appeal, and the order took effect in August.
That pattern, states either conceding or losing outright, suggests the DOJ's reading of the 1996 law is holding up in court. The statute's language does not leave much room for creative workarounds.
The four newest targets bring the geographic sweep of the campaign from coast to coast and into the nation's capital. Hawaii and the District of Columbia are deep-blue jurisdictions where tuition subsidies for illegal immigrants have faced little local opposition. Arkansas and Utah are red-leaning states, a reminder that these policies crossed party lines in statehouses for years before the federal government intervened.
Before the latest filings, the DOJ had already brought cases against New Jersey, Maryland, California, Minnesota, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, in addition to the six states where courts have already ruled. The current status of those pending cases is not specified in the DOJ's announcement, but the six favorable rulings give the department strong momentum heading into the remaining fights.
The legal campaign is part of a broader pattern of aggressive DOJ enforcement on immigration-related issues. The department has sued New York over a state law criminalizing masks worn by federal agents, and it has opened new fronts on noncitizen voting enforcement as well.
Supporters of in-state tuition policies for illegal immigrants argue the programs provide educational opportunities to students who have lived in the states and met applicable residency or educational requirements. That framing treats physical presence and local schooling as sufficient grounds for taxpayer-subsidized tuition, even when the student has no legal right to be in the country.
The problem with that argument is the statute. Congress did not leave this to state discretion. Section 505 of the 1996 law set a clear condition: if a state wants to offer postsecondary education benefits based on residency to people not lawfully present, it must extend the same benefit to every U.S. citizen regardless of where they live. Most states that created these programs never met that condition. They gave tuition breaks to illegal immigrants that out-of-state American citizens could not access.
A DOJ crackdown on noncitizen voter registration has drawn similar objections from the same quarters, and similar results when the cases reach court.
The federal courts that have ruled so far have not been persuaded by the states' arguments. Six for six is not a fluke. It reflects a statute that says what it means.
Woodward's statement that the department has now challenged every state with a policy covered by its legal theory raises a question the DOJ has not publicly answered: are there additional jurisdictions with similar policies that fall outside the department's current reading of the law? The answer will determine whether 25 is the final number or a plateau.
What is already clear is the scale of the effort. Twenty-five lawsuits spanning at least 17 named states and the District of Columbia represent one of the most coordinated federal enforcement campaigns against state immigration-related policies in recent memory. The D.C. political establishment is now a direct target, not just an observer.
For years, states handed tuition subsidies to people who broke federal immigration law while charging full freight to American citizens from neighboring states. Congress told them not to. The Justice Department is finally making that stick.