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In the thick of college application season, some undocumented students are discovering they’ve lost eligibility for in-state tuition.
Other students’ eligibility for lower tuition at state colleges and universities may be up in the air as litigation winds through federal court. And in Florida, state authorities have banned them from enrolling in a public college or university at all.
“It has been a little bit bleak and disappointing,” said Martinez, a college counselor in north Texas, one of the states that has backtracked on in-state tuition for undocumented students. (Chalkbeat is only using her last name because she is in the process of gaining citizenship and concerned about immigration enforcement.)
While children have a right to a public K-12 education in the U.S. regardless of their immigration status, undocumented students’ access to higher education is shrinking due to actions by states and the federal government. The consequences extend beyond college campuses. The changes not only create confusion for high schoolers, but some worry they might discourage more undocumented students from even finishing high school due to pessimism about their long-term prospects.
Over two decades, states created policies that allowed graduates of their high schools who were undocumented to pay the same lower college tuition as their classmates who were U.S. citizens. The federal government also gave young people who arrived as children a pathway to work authorization and protection from deportation through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, commonly known as DACA.
Now, the Trump administration is trying to close those doors. It has sued two dozen states to end in-state tuition policies and pressured states to end access to career and technical education for undocumented students. Students, meanwhile, cannot currently get DACA status amid ongoing legal challenges.
Immigration hardliners argue that granting benefits like in-state tuition to undocumented students unfairly displaces students who are citizens from attending state universities.
“It’s easy to put a human face on that illegal alien student … but for most middle class families, a seat at a state university is the only real option,” said Ira Mehlman, media director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which has filed briefs in support of the federal government’s lawsuits.
But supporters of immigrant students — including an estimated 525,000 undocumented students enrolled in U.S. colleges — say they are as deserving as citizens, and many have received much of their education in the states where they would receive the in-state benefit.
“I don’t think anybody was expecting the federal government to sue every single state in such a short period of time,” said Diego Sánchez, vice president of policy and strategy for the President’s Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. “We’re seeing the pathway from high school into college and the workforce is narrowing in different ways.”
New political pressure limits access to higher education
Policies giving undocumented students access to in-state tuition started under Republican state leadership.
In 2001 under Gov. Rick Perry, Texas granted the benefit to undocumented students who had lived in Texas for at least three years. Other states passed similar legislation. Perry defended that policy a decade later when he was a presidential candidate, calling the ethos behind the law the “American way.”
But the second Trump administration has targeted almost every state with a tuition-equity law, at the same time that it’s ramped up immigration enforcement activity.
Challenges to those policies in other states have yielded mixed results this year. But when the Department of Justice sued Texas in June 2025 to overturn its in-state tuition policy, state Attorney General Ken Paxton agreed to end it instead of going to court. Kansas, Kentucky, and Nebraska officials also agreed to ending their policies.
The impact on tens of thousands of Texas students and institutions serving them was swift and confusing, said Will Davies, director of policy and research at Breakthrough Central Texas, a college access nonprofit that works directly with students.
“Most of these kids grew up here,” he said. “They went to high school under the impression that if they, like their peers, got good grades and had a high rank in their high school, they were going to have affordable and high quality post-secondary options to pursue, and for a lot of those people, that promise was broken pretty much immediately.”
In addition, universities didn’t have clear direction for how to enforce the change, he said.
Conservatives have targeted other postsecondary education opportunities. Florida prohibited undocumented students from certain career-technical education programs in September. A Chalkbeat review found that Iowa, Virginia, and Georgia have taken steps to restrict undocumented students’ access to dual enrollment courses and career-technical education programs. Virginia later abandoned the policy.
While undocumented students have a right to a public education under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Plyler v. Doe ruling, seeing postsecondary doors close may send them a discouraging message about their prospects, said Julie Sugarman, associate director for K-12 research with the Migration Policy Institute.
“When students don’t feel like they see a future, they don’t end up staying in high school,” she said.
Counselor tells students to seek an education ‘sidequest’
In states where in-state tuition policies for undocumented students have recently ended, counselors have a delicate balance to strike when talking to students about their options.
Martinez said she often presents students with the idea of a “sidequest” if the degree they want might be too difficult or expensive to obtain due to their immigration status.
For example, a student who wants to go into nursing might think about pursuing a business degree first to help run a family business, because being a nurse might require a work permit in the future.
She said she tells students, “Life is happening. What are ways that you can grow as a person and develop yourself as a professional, so you can still make that one step forward for the career that you want?”
Their reactions are mixed, Martinez said. Some begin to brainstorm immediately. Others struggle to process the idea when she first raises it.
Davies of Breakthrough Central Texas said his organization has seen a number of students delay enrolling due to Texas’ policy change. He directs students to seek out aid and scholarships, some of which are tailored to help immigrant students. While some organizations have stepped in to try to narrow funding gaps, “it’s not enough to really address the broader problem.”
While financial barriers are significant for students, the current political climate is ultimately “a moment in time” — and a higher education is still worth pursuing, said Hyein Lee, chief operating officer of thedream.us, one of the largest scholarship funds for undocumented students.
“We also want to help our students understand and think more long term about how investing in their education now will pay dividends in the long term, even if it may not seem like this,” she said.
Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org. Lily is on Instagram, Tik Tok, and Facebook.