RICHMOND, Va. (CN) -The Justice Department announced Tuesday its challenge to Virginia laws that provide immigrant students without permanent legal status the ability to obtain in-state tuition rates and assistance.
"This is a simple matter of federal law: in Virginia and nationwide, schools cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens," Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement Tuesday. "This Department of Justice will not tolerate American students being treated like second-class citizens in their own country."
The United States filed the suit in a Richmond-based federal court on Monday, arguing that a pair of laws passed in 2020 and 2021 run afoul of federal law, which prohibits states from providing postsecondary education benefits denied to U.S. citizens. The Donald Trump-backed Justice Department called the policies unfair to citizens from other states.
"This is not only wrong but illegal," the Justice Department wrote in its complaint. "The challenged act's discriminatory treatment in favor of illegal aliens over U.S. citizens is squarely prohibited and preempted by federal law."
The Justice Department seeks an order declaring the challenged provisions as unconstitutional.
The challenge comes after Trump signed executive orders aimed at stopping the disbursement of taxpayer-funded benefits to immigrants without legal status during the first four months of his second term. The Justice Department also relies on the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which sought to curb such immigrants' access to public benefits.
According to a report from the Higher Ed Immigration Portal, an initiative of the Presidents' Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, over 13,000 undocumented students are attending higher education institutions in Virginia, with around 5,000 graduating from high school each year. A 2024 report indicated that these students made up 1.9% of the nation's university students.
Virginia law provides that to be eligible for in-state tuition, a student must establish that they live in the state and that the student, or one of their parents or guardians, filed state income tax returns for at least two years preceding the date of registration or enrollment. Tuition at the University of Virginia is $23,897 for in-state and $62,923 for out-of-state students.
"For over 32 years, my mom was a guidance counselor focused on ESL and immigrant kids at one of the most diverse high schools in Northern Virginia. Far too often, she had the terrible task of breaking the news to outstanding young students that, because of their immigration status, the dreams that they worked so hard for would not come true," Delegate Alphonzo Lopez, who sponsored the House version of the legislation, said during a committee hearing. "They're goal-oriented with high academic standing. They're valedictorians, class presidents and our next generation of leaders, making up less than four in every 1000 students attending Virginia public colleges and universities. We should be fighting to nurture their growth, not putting up stop signs to their potential."
State Senator Jennifer Boysko, who, along with Lieutenant Governor-elect Ghazala Hashmi, carried the Senate versions of the bills, said the policy benefits all Virginians.
"We are having a shortage of our workforce in Virginia and around the nation, and these students that we empower to have access to financial aid and in-state tuition are educated in Virginia, their parents pay taxes in Virginia, they have done the work that has been asked of them and we felt that it was an important thing to provide access to education that's affordable, so that we have a strong workforce ready to take over for the next generation and our economy running," Boysko said in an interview. "It's an important piece of our economic growth in Virginia."
The Justice Department filed similar tuition lawsuits against Illinois, Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Minnesota and California. Texas quickly agreed to the Trump administration's demands, ending in-state tuition rates for residents without legal status just hours after the Justice Department filed its lawsuit in June.
"This law was an insult to our nation's citizens and has now been rightly stopped from being enforced," Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said then in a joint statement with Bondi. "I will continue to fight for the American people and work swiftly to defeat any policy that puts illegal aliens ahead of our own citizens."
Source: Courthouse News Service
