The U.S. Department of Justice is suing Arizona along with a handful of other states for allowing "Dreamers" to pay in-state college tuition.
Arizona voters passed Proposition 308 in 2022. It allows noncitizen students to pay in-state college tuition if they’ve gone to an Arizona school for a minimum of two years and graduated from an Arizona high school.
The DOJ said in a statement that providing financial aid and in-state tuition to “illegal aliens” unconstitutionally discriminates against U.S. citizens who don’t have the same opportunity.
Aliento, the group that pushed Prop. 308, encouraged Dreamers to continue pursuing higher education in Arizona — predicting the lawsuit will fail.
In legal papers filed in federal court, the Department of Justice says the policy, approved by Arizona voters in 2022, violates a 1998 federal law.
It also runs afoul of a sweeping executive order issued last year by Trump directing the agency to take action against any state that has practices that give benefits to aliens that are not available to all American citizens. That, the order says, includes "state laws that provide in-state higher education tuition to aliens but not to out-of-state American citizens."
Similar lawsuits have been filed against more than a dozen other states, according to Assistant Attorney General Garrett Greene who signed the new lawsuit. And he said judges there have voided those policies in five states.
It's not just the Board of Regents that is being sued over the tuition policies at the three universities it oversees.
The new lawsuit also asks a federal judge to overturn Prop. 308 as violating the supremacy of federal laws on immigration. And that, according to federal attorneys, also would override policies of the Maricopa and Pima community colleges that base financial aid on the same basis that the universities decide who gets to pay in-state tuition, meaning Arizona high school graduation and not immigration status.
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