Texas has finally ended what amounts to a decades-long incentive for illegal immigration: taxpayer-funded in-state tuition. For over twenty years, Texas laws required state colleges and universities to offer reduced tuition to aliens, whether they were here legally or not.
Late yesterday, those laws abruptly came to an end, only hours after the U.S. Department of Justice sued to block the state from enforcing them.
Texas Governor Gregg Abbott announced the parties’ joint consent on X:
Enacted in 2001, the Texas Dream Act granted eligible undocumented students access to in-state tuition rates at public colleges and universities—a benefit denied to citizens from other states.
But that’s discrimination against our own citizenry, and it’s illegal. “Under federal law, schools cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens,” Attorney General Bondi said in a statement announcing the short-lived lawsuit yesterday. “The Texas laws blatantly conflict with federal law and are thus in conflict with the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.”
The federal government’s complaint follows two executive orders recently signed by President Trump: “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders,” to ensure that no taxpayer-funded benefits go to unqualified aliens; and “Protecting American Communities From Criminal Aliens,” to countermand state laws like the one in Texas that offer in-state education tuition to aliens but not to out-of-State American citizens.
By early last night, United States District Judge Reed O’Connor had declared the Texas laws unconstitutional and invalid, blocking the state from enforcing them.
That such laws were even on the books in Texas came as a surprise to the state’s citizens. They were outraged:
The Texas Legislature was mulling a bill to prevent illegal immigrants from receiving in-state college tuition rates but still hadn’t passed it.
Texans demanded to know why it took “47” to get the job done:
Texas isn’t the only state that has given illegal aliens preferential tuition benefits. Campus Reform reports that 23 other states allow illegal immigrants to receive in-state tuition.
Now that the federal government has done what Texas failed to do on its own—making sure American citizens “are not treated like second-class citizens anywhere in the country”—we’ll be watching to see which of those states is next on the DOJ’s hit list.
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