FORT WORTH, Texas (CN) - Texas can no longer grant in-state tuition to resident students without legal status as U.S. citizens or permanent residents, following a joint agreement with the Department of Justice and a federal judge's injunction.
On Thursday, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi applauded the decision, which came just hours after the Trump administration sued Texas over a law they said allowed residents of the state without legal U.S. immigration status to only pay in-state tuition rates at Texas colleges and universities.
"The Justice Department commends Texas leadership and AG Ken Paxton for swiftly working with us to halt a program that was treating Americans like second-class citizens in their own country," Bondi said in a statement. "Other states should take note that we will continue filing affirmative litigation to remedy unconstitutional state laws that discriminate against American citizens."
After the administration filed their suit early Wednesday morning, the Department of Justice and the Texas Attorney General's Office filed a joint motion agreeing to the federal government's claims on the same day.
"The parties agree that federal law ... expressly preempts the Texas Education Code provisions ... that grant benefits to aliens, who are not lawfully present in the United States, based on their residency in Texas, that are not available to all U.S. citizens regardless of residency," they said in the joint motion, which asked for a federal court to find the law unconstitutional, as it violated the supremacy clause.
U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor, an appointee of George W. Bush, signed a permanent injunction Wednesday evening following the joint agreement.
"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. Ending this discriminatory and un-American provision is a major victory for Texas," Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a Wednesday statement.
According to the DOJ, two provisions of the Texas Education Code that set out ways for state residents to qualify for in-state tuition rates at Texas colleges and universities violated a 1996 federal law because they allowed people who were not legal residents of the United States to qualify for in-state tuition.
The 1996 law blocked in-state tuition benefits for non-legal residents unless citizens of any state in the U.S. could receive those benefits regardless of their state of residency.
While the first challenged provision of the code says that citizens of countries other than the United States cannot generally receive in-state tuition benefits in Texas, it lays out three caveats. The second challenged provision, which sets out one of the three caveats, simply listed the state residency requirement for in-state tuition as three years of Texas residency at the time of high school graduation or equivalent diploma and one year at the time of college enrollment.
A later provision of the code, one the DOJ did not challenge but cited in its complaint, granted students without legal status the right to apply for in-state tuition if they swore in an affidavit that they would apply for legal residency as soon as they became eligible.
Source: Courthouse News Service
