The Department of Justice filed suit Monday against New York, Connecticut, and Vermont — three blue states that have been quietly handing illegal aliens a benefit that out-of-state American citizens don’t receive: in-state tuition and financial aid at their public universities.
Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate put it plainly: “This is a simple matter of federal law: colleges cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens. This Department of Justice will not tolerate American students being treated like second-class citizens in their own country.”
The legal principle at stake is not complicated. Federal immigration law has long prohibited states from giving illegal aliens benefits that aren’t equally available to American citizens. States can’t simply declare someone a “resident” because they have a local address and use that declaration to unlock subsidized tuition — especially when an American student from a neighboring state would pay full out-of-state rates at those same institutions.
Monday’s lawsuits are the 17th the DOJ has filed challenging in-state tuition for illegal aliens. The administration has now sued every state in the Second Circuit that has tried to preserve these preferences. This is a coordinated, systematic effort to enforce a law that blue states have spent years actively defying.
The economic reality of these policies deserves to be stated plainly. When an illegal alien receives in-state tuition at a New York, Connecticut, or Vermont public university, that subsidy comes from somewhere. It comes from state taxpayers and from the higher rates charged to everyone else — including American citizens from other states whose tax dollars help fund the same institutions. Illegal aliens are receiving a government benefit that American citizens are literally paying for and can’t access.
That’s not a technicality. That’s an inversion of the entire purpose of in-state tuition — which exists to reward state residents who have paid taxes and contributed to the institutions they’re using. The moment you extend in-state rates to people who are in the country illegally, you’ve transformed a benefit for contributing members of the community into an incentive for illegal border crossing.
These policies are also, as the DOJ correctly argues, a draw. When word spreads — and it does — that you can cross into the United States illegally, establish a local address, and access subsidized higher education at the expense of American taxpayers, that’s an advertisement. It’s one more entry in the long list of benefits that made the Biden open-border era so attractive to people with no legal right to be here.
The DOJ’s statement noted that Congress made clear long ago: states cannot put illegal aliens over the nation’s own citizens.
Seventeen lawsuits. The effort, as the DOJ’s statement promised, will not cease. American students first. Not second. Not equal. First.
