American College Students Paid Out-of-State Rates While Illegal Aliens Got Discounts — AG Todd Blanche Just Said Enough

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.