The Trump administration is suing Democrat Gov. Tim Walz and Minnesota over the state legislature’s law allowing illegal aliens to be awarded in-state tuition to state colleges and universities.
The law, called the North Star Promise program, allows illegal aliens who can prove they live in and went to school in the state to pay the same in-state tuition that legal residents pay, even while charging American citizens from other states much higher fees.
The administration says that Minnesota’s law is “flagrantly violating” a federal law that prevents states from giving cheap tuition to illegal aliens if they also impose higher costs on U.S. citizens from other states.
“Congress has passed a law against this practice, giving Americans from any state an entitlement to pay the same instate tuition to another state’s public universities as illegal aliens who live in that state pay based on their residence,” explains a press release by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which has filed a brief in the case.
“No state can be allowed to treat Americans like second-class citizens in their own country by offering financial benefits to illegal aliens,” U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement, CNN reported.
Minnesota Democrats employed a tricky device to try and skirt the law passed by Congress. The Democrats have based their law, not on residence, but on whether an applicant attended high school in Minnesota. Therefore, the state claims it can penalize Americans with higher tuition costs if they attended high school outside of Minnesota. This, the state Democrats claim, gives them the ability to continue overcharging American citizens quite in contravention to the flavor of the law passed in Washington.
“For Minnesota, it’s not enough to let illegal aliens—who are not permitted to live in the United States at all—into its state schools, and apply lower admission standards to instate illegal aliens than to out-of-state Americans,” said FAIR general counsel Christopher J. Hajec. “Even after all that, Minnesota also lets them pay much less in tuition than the out-of-state Americans have to pay. That’s where federal law and its supremacy come in, however. We hope the court sees that this state-of-high-school-attendance maneuver does not save Minnesota’s law, and rules for the United States.”
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