The end of the ‘Texas Dream’: Undocumented youth will not have access to in-state tuition

Undocumented students will no longer have access to reduced tuition rates at Texas public universities, as legal residents do. A federal judge has struck down a law that favored foreign students for more than 20 years, following a lawsuit filed Wednesday by the Department of Justice.

Known as the Texas Dream Act, the law, passed in 2001 by Republican Governor Rick Perry, was the first of its kind in the country. It allowed students without legal immigration status to apply for reduced in-state tuition, provided they could prove they had lived in Texas for at least three years and had graduated from a local high school. The rule required Americans from other states to pay higher tuition to study at these schools, which District Judge Reed O’Connor, who signed the ruling, found unconstitutional. “The challenged provisions, as applied to aliens not lawfully present in the United States, violate the Supremacy Clause and are unconstitutional and invalid,” the Court stated.

According to State Attorney General Ken Paxton, the measure provided benefits to undocumented immigrants unavailable to U.S. citizens, and he therefore filed the motion to repeal it, jointly with the Trump administration. “The law unconstitutionally and unlawfully gave benefits to illegal aliens that were not available to American citizens,” Paxton stressed.

On his social media account, the attorney general stated that “ending this discriminatory and un-American provision is a major victory for Texas,” in a message that was echoed by several conservative groups that had been trying to eliminate it for years.

“Under federal law, schools cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. The Justice Department also announced that it “The Justice Department will relentlessly fight to vindicate federal law and ensure that U.S. citizens are not treated like second-class citizens anywhere in the country.”

The new measure complicates the dreams of thousands of university students in the state, and many others who had hoped to enroll in upcoming courses. “It’s quite unfair, even violent, to deny people an education. Someone who, instead of being on the streets stealing, is in the library studying for a degree, shouldn’t be placed at a disadvantage for not having [immigration] status,” an undocumented Venezuelan living in North Texas who aspired to study medicine told EL PAÍS. “My parents work hard, and so do I, and we barely have enough money, so now my dream of graduating and contributing to this country is even further away,” the 20-year-old migrant added.

United We Dream, the nation’s largest migrant youth-led organization, issued a statement calling the repeal “deeply unpopular and destructive.” “This decision will have catastrophic consequences across the state, from weakening the state’s workforce and economy — costing an estimated $460 million a year in lost wages — to stripping thousands of Texan students of an affordable path to higher education,” said the statement.

“Robbing students of their freedom to learn simply because of their immigration status is not just morally wrong — it means that students who are currently enrolled, studying hard, attending lectures, and contributing meaningfully to campus life will be forced out of the classrooms they’ve been a part of for years — resulting in empty seats, disrupted futures, and a state that turns it back on the very people who power it forward,” added United We Dream.

According to 2022 data, more than 57,000 undocumented immigrants attend Texas public universities, representing approximately 8% of total enrollment.

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