Three more Democratic-led states now have to fight the Trump administration in court over letting immigrants without legal status pay the in-state tuition rate at public colleges.
DOJ Files Suit in New York, Connecticut and Vermont
On Monday, the Justice Department filed separate lawsuits against New York, Connecticut and Vermont, targeting state laws that let some students without legal immigration status pay the lower in-state rate at public universities. Each complaint asks a judge to permanently halt the tuition and financial-aid programs, arguing the policies amount to unequal treatment that favors noncitizens over U.S. citizens who live outside those states. The story broke Monday through New York Times reporting, which noted the three suits complete a sweep of every state in the Second Circuit that still offers such tuition benefits.
Nearly every case in this expanding push cites the same law: 8 U.S.C. § 1623(a), a 1996 provision barring states from granting a residency-based college benefit to someone without lawful status unless an out-of-state American citizen could claim the identical benefit. That reading already prevailed once this summer — the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to revive Texas's Dream Act on July 9, leaving the state's 25-year-old tuition break dead for good. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward framed the new filings bluntly, saying Congress had made clear "States cannot put illegal aliens over our Nation's own citizens." Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate added that the department "will not tolerate American students being treated like second-class citizens," calling it a straightforward matter of federal law.
Two Executive Orders Set the Campaign in Motion
The lawsuits trace back to a pair of orders President Trump signed in 2025: a January order aimed broadly at cutting off taxpayer-funded benefits for people without legal status, and a follow-up order that April that specifically directed the attorney general to hunt down state laws favoring noncitizens over citizens, naming the 1996 tuition statute outright. That second directive is what set the current run of state-by-state lawsuits into motion.
New York's governor didn't personally weigh in Monday — a spokesperson for Kathy Hochul said the state was reviewing the complaint but stood behind its approach, relaying that the governor believes "all New York high school students deserve the opportunity to pursue higher education." Connecticut's response landed sharper. Attorney General William Tong told the administration directly that "how we run our schools and teach our kids is none of your business," vowing to defend a law he says he championed as a state legislator back in 2011. Vermont Gov. Phil Scott's office had nothing to say publicly as of Monday evening.
New York's Tuition Break Goes Back Decades
None of this is new territory for New York. Students already enrolled at CUNY in the fall of 2001 locked in in-state rates under a rule that predates the current fight by nearly a quarter-century, and the state broadened the benefit substantially with the 2019 Jose Peralta DREAM Act, opening up state financial aid and the Excelsior Scholarship to eligible students regardless of status. Pinning down exactly how many students that covers is trickier than it sounds. A 2014 state comptroller's report put total CUNY and SUNY enrollment at roughly 8,300 as of fall 2013, a figure the report said had barely budged from the year before. That's a different kind of count than a more recent City Limits estimate of about 4,500 undocumented students graduating from New York high schools in 2019 alone — a yearly flow of prospective students, not a snapshot of everyone already enrolled in college, so the two figures aren't really measuring the same thing.
Five Wins, One Loss, and a Docket That Keeps Growing
Monday's filings push the Justice Department's tally to 17 lawsuits challenging tuition-equity laws nationwide, the department said in its announcement. The government's record so far leans heavily in its favor: courts or settlements have already ended similar programs in Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Nebraska, and on July 24 a federal judge in Illinois ruled that the state's RISE Act and Illinois DREAM Act conflict with federal law — notable because Illinois actually mounted a legal defense rather than settling like the others. The one clear setback for the administration came in March, when a federal judge dismissed the case against Minnesota after finding the state's eligibility rules didn't hinge on residency the way the statute requires. Beyond those five resolved cases, the department says it's still litigating against roughly nine more states, including California, Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts.
What Comes Next for Students
Students already covered under the New York, Connecticut and Vermont programs can keep paying the in-state rate for now, unless a judge grants the government's request to freeze the laws before the underlying cases are resolved. Given how lopsided the government's record has been elsewhere, all three states appear to be facing steep odds in court — though based on Tong's and Hochul's early statements, neither state looks ready to concede without a fight.
