Oklahoma has agreed to bar undocumented immigrants from qualifying for in-state tuition after the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit.
On Aug. 5, the DOJ filed a complaint that argues an Oklahoma state law conflicts with federal law, which prohibits universities from giving benefits to undocumented immigrants that aren’t available to U.S. citizens. The suit alleges “non-equal treatment” because noncitizens are able to access in-state tuition — generally thousands of dollars cheaper than paying the out-of-state rate — while U.S. students from other states are not. The state agreed to end the policy after the complaint was filed.
Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, had been working with the DOJ on the issue for the past two months, so the lawsuit wasn’t a surprise to him.
In fact, a spokesperson for Drummond said that shortly after the DOJ sued over a similar law in Texas, which quickly came to an agreement to end its policy, Drummond got in touch with the department.
Trending
“The Attorney General agreed that federal law precludes giving tuition benefits to illegal immigrants that are not available to U.S. citizens,” Leslie Berger, a spokesperson for Drummond, said in an email to NOTUS on Tuesday. “He has worked with the Department of Justice on a resolution the last two months that culminated in the filing of last week’s lawsuit and joint motion for judgment.”
The law had been in effect for about two decades in Oklahoma and provided in-state tuition benefits to students without an immigration status as long as they had applied for permanent residency in the state. Berger said the Biden administration “failing to secure the border” had “brought the issue to the forefront nationally and in Oklahoma.”
“Today marks the end of a longstanding exploitation of Oklahoma taxpayers, who for many years have subsidized colleges and universities as they provide unlawful benefits to illegal immigrants in the form of in-state tuition,” Drummond said in a news release.
The Justice Department has now sued four states for having similar laws. Over 20 states and the District of Columbia have policies like Oklahoma’s, according to Inside Higher Education. The DOJ would not answer NOTUS’ question about future action it plans to take against other states.
In June, the Justice Department sued Minnesota. Democratic State Attorney General Keith Ellison is actively “defending Minnesota’s duly enacted laws,” spokesperson Brian Evans wrote to NOTUS. The lawsuit is still ongoing, and the law is still in effect.
“Minnesota does not provide benefits to undocumented students on the basis of residence, and it provides the same benefits to U.S. citizens without regard to their residence,” Ellison’s motion to dismiss says. It also argues the Trump administration’s reading of the Minnesota law “raises serious Tenth Amendment concerns.”
However, Ellison was “not particularly” surprised his state was sued, “given the conduct of this administration so far,” Evans wrote.
In Kentucky, where the regulation appears to have been in effect since before 2010, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear has also filed a motion to dismiss the Justice Department’s lawsuit, spokesperson Scottie Ellis wrote in an email to NOTUS. Ellis said the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, another defendant, “is an independent agency under Kentucky law. CPE has sole authority to determine student residency requirements for the purposes of in-state tuition and controls its own regulations.”
But Kentucky’s Republican attorney general, Russell Coleman, has called on Beshear and the council to change the policy after the DOJ sued the state. (The council declined to comment on the case for now.)
“If the CPE and Governor Beshear want to continue ignoring federal law, I fully expect them to lose in court,” Coleman wrote in a news release in July. “The federal government has set its immigration policy, and the Council must regulate in accordance with it. To that end, I urge the Council to withdraw its regulation rather than litigate what I believe will be, and should be, a losing fight.”
—
This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and Oklahoma Watch.
Author
