DOJ Sues Four States On Tuition For Illegals
The Justice Department sued four more states over laws that grant illegal immigrants in-state college tuition, arguing the policies illegally favor noncitizens over American students from out of state. The suits extend a national campaign built on a nearly 30-year-old federal statute that most states quietly ignored.
What was filed
Four states, one theory. The department sued Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington on August 28 over their tuition laws, arguing each violates federal law by offering illegal immigrants a benefit it denies to US citizens living in other states.
The statute is the hook. The suits rest on 8 U.S.C. § 1623, enacted as part of the 1996 immigration-reform law, which bars states from giving in-state tuition to those unlawfully present unless the same rate is offered to any American citizen regardless of residency. A law on the books since 1996 is only now being enforced at scale.
Part of a wave. These four are part of a broader effort covering 21 states, of which the department says it has already succeeded in striking down five.
In their own words
The department framed the suits as a matter of citizens first. “By granting illegal aliens in-state tuition, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico and Arizona are pushing citizens to the side and ignoring federal law. No more,” said Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. “Our efforts will not cease until President Trump’s promise is fulfilled: illegal aliens will not receive benefits denied to American citizens.”
How it works
The legal argument is structural, and it is stronger than it first appears. The 1996 statute does not forbid states from charging illegal immigrants the in-state rate outright; it forbids doing so unless the same rate is extended to out-of-state US citizens. In practice, states that offer illegal immigrants in-state tuition do not offer that rate to an American student from a neighboring state, which is precisely the disparity the law was written to prevent. The department’s claim is not that these states are too generous to immigrants but that they are less generous to some citizens, and the text of the statute supports that framing.
The state laws, often called Dream Act tuition policies, were passed on the premise that students brought to the country as children and raised in-state should pay the resident rate at public universities. That is a sympathetic case politically, but it collides with a federal statute that conditions the benefit on equal treatment of out-of-state citizens, and courts asked to reconcile the two have so far sided with the federal text.
Worth watching
The deeper principle is equal treatment among citizens. The strongest version of the government’s case is not about immigrants at all; it is that a state cannot charge an American student from across the border more than it charges an illegal immigrant living in-state, because federal law forbids that specific inequality. Framed that way, the suits are about which Americans a state may disadvantage, and the answer the statute gives is none.
The four new suits will test whether the pattern from the enjoined states holds, and how many of the remaining tuition laws survive the same argument. A 1996 statute is being enforced for the first time at national scale, and the states that wrote around it for years are now defending policies against a federal text that was always there. Whether the courts finish what the department started is the question the coming rulings answer.
-The Editors
Liberty · Upstream of the Swamp · August 29, 2026
