Trump Is on a National Tirade Against In-State Tuition for Undocumented Students

This month, Oklahoma’s Attorney General joined with the U.S. Department of Justice in a lawsuit seeking to overturn an Oklahoma state law giving in-state higher education tuition rates to undocumented residents.

The lawsuit piggybacks off a January executive order titled Protecting the American People Against Invasion, part of which required the Attorney General and the Department of Homeland Security to review contracts with organizations that continued to provide services to undocumented immigrants. It also piggybacks off an executive order from April that notified higher education institutions they would be in violation of the federal code and face punishments if they offered in-state tuition rates to undocumented students.

Currently, 23 states plus D.C. provide in-state tuition to undocumented residents no matter their immigration status or the college they attend. Several other states provide in-state tuition only to some institutions and/or to Dreamers — young adults who were brought to the U.S. as children and who are enrolled in the DACA program created during the Obama administration, which allows them to work and study legally in the U.S. — but not to other undocumented residents. Eighteen states also provide state financial aid. Less than 20 states don’t have some form of in-state tuition for these residents, with a disproportionate number of those being in the deep South.

Trump is actively working to overturn this broad national consensus on making education more accessible to all residents. His orders are squarely aimed at Dreamers, a group that, until Trump’s rise, enjoyed generally bipartisan sympathies. Indeed, until Trump put his fingers on the scale, it was the emerging consensus that teens and young adults who had been brought to the U.S. without documentation as young children were American in all-but-citizenship and ought to have pathways to full participation in U.S. society. That consensus led President Obama to sign the DACA executive order, which provided some legal cover to these young adults and largely shielded them from deportation. And, even before DACA, it had also led many states to independently pass laws guaranteeing in-state tuition to undocumented students.

In fact, prior to Trump, some of the country’s most conservative states led the way on providing educational opportunities to undocumented students. Texas, which currently has 73,000 undocumented students enrolled in higher education, passed the country’s first in-state tuition law, the Texas Dream Act, in 2001. And in 2011, the conservative governor, Rick Perry, vociferously defended the Act during a Republican presidential debate, announcing “this is the American way.”

Oklahoma passed its in-state tuition law in 2007, in recognition of the fact that a significant part of the Oklahoma population lacked legal immigration paperwork and, without state intervention, would be destined to live in the shadows economically. There are nearly 100,000 undocumented residents in Oklahoma and more than 12,000 DACA-eligible Oklahomans. As of 2025, an estimated 1.3 percent of higher education students in the state are undocumented.

There are more than half a million undocumented higher education students in the U.S. Their futures are all on the line now.

These are the people whom Trump is determined to drive out of higher education. Taken in tandem with the administration’s escalating efforts to get universities to part with admissions data (apparently part of a gotcha plan to accuse them of nefariously finding ways to admit more Black and Brown students), this is increasingly looking like a concerted bid, marshaling the full resources of the federal government, to make the student populations in U.S. universities whiter and more affluent again.

There are more than half a million undocumented higher education students in the U.S. Their futures — including the careers they seek to enter post-college — are all on the line now that Trump has arrayed the full might of the federal government against their ability to attend university affordably.

Given the economic stakes of sabotaging a group of rising, tax-paying workers in this way, one might think that even GOP states would balk at attacking undocumented people’s ability to access higher education. But, with Trump and MAGA exerting near-total control over state GOP legislators and attorneys general, instead they have leapt into the fray to overturn their in-state tuition laws.

Florida, which has gone further than any other state in empowering campus law enforcement to inquire into students’ immigration status, led the way in February, overturning a decade-old law that had long enjoyed bipartisan support.

In June, Texas’s hard-right attorney general, Ken Paxton, sided with the U.S. Justice Department in asking the courts to overturn the Lone Star State’s law — and U.S. district court judge Reed O’Connor immediately obliged. The American Immigration Council calculated this could cost Texas $460 million per year in lost earnings and decreased spending power. Oklahoma reversed its policy on in-state tuition for undocumented students on August 6.

The Trump administration also has ongoing lawsuits against Kentucky and Minnesota, arguing that their in-state tuition laws are illegal. And it seems like only a matter of time before the administration expands its legal offensive against every other likeminded state program.

States with Democratic governors and/or attorneys general will go to bat to protect their programs. Arizona’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, last week explained that the voter-approved Proposition 308, which allocated in-state tuition to undocumented students if they had a high school diploma and lived in the state for at least two years, would withstand a Trump challenge because it technically didn’t require “residency.” California’s law is similarly worded to avoid running afoul of federal law. But for undocumented students in red states, access to higher education will likely wither on the vine in the coming years.

After the November election, Trump announced that he wanted to work out a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers. But now that he actually has the power to implement change, he is instead using that power to push red states to exile Dreamers from higher education and the opportunities that go with it, trying to force them back into the economic shadows from which they were only just beginning to emerge.