Attorney General Todd Blanche leads the Justice Department, which has filed 25 lawsuits over policies to make undocumented students eligible for in-state tuition.
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For more than a year, the U.S. Justice Department has steadily worked its way through the list of states that allow eligible noncitizens to pay in-state college tuition. The agency sued first Texas and then Kentucky, arguing that the policies violated federal statute.
Now, DOJ has sued 24 states and Washington, D.C., in what advocates call a coordinated assault on the rights of undocumented students. The last batch of lawsuits was filed Thursday against Arkansas, D.C., Hawaii and Utah.
The DOJ, which began filing these lawsuits last summer, argues the policies incentivize illegal immigration and disadvantage Americans from other states who don’t qualify for in-state tuition. The lawsuits have ended in-state tuition for undocumented students in Kentucky, Illinois, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas and most recently Kansas. Florida, which passed a bipartisan in-state tuition bill in 2014, pre-emptively eliminated its policy in February 2025 and, last week, barred undocumented students from enrolling in any selective public university.
