DOJ Sues Colorado For Offering In-State Tuition Aid To Illegal Immigrants

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

The Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Colorado on Thursday over state regulations that provide in-state tuition and financial aid to illegal immigrants.

The July 23 lawsuit, filed with the District Court for the District of Colorado, accused Colorado of ignoring Title 8 of the U.S. Code Section 1623, which bans illegal immigrants from being eligible for post-secondary education benefits in a state unless the same benefits are provided to all U.S. citizens, irrespective of their state of residence.

Colorado’s Advancing Students for a Stronger Tomorrow Act, initially passed in 2013 and amended in 2019 and 2022, allows illegal immigrant students living in the state to access in-state tuition and financial aid.

In-state tuition benefits are granted to eligible students when applying to Colorado public universities or community colleges, whereas out-of-state U.S. citizens are required to pay higher tuition rates at these institutions.

“These statutes constitute blatant unequal treatment favoring illegal aliens over U.S. citizens. Worse, such preferential treatment is squarely prohibited and preempted by Congress,” the lawsuit said.

According to a fact sheet from the Colorado Department of Higher Education, the Act removed several barriers that had prevented thousands of illegal immigrant high school students from qualifying for in-state tuition and financial benefits.

The 2022 revision of the Act reduced the time an illegal immigrant student needed to attend high school to obtain these benefits from at least three years to just one year.

Under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, extending eligibility for post-secondary education benefits to illegal immigrants is “unconstitutional,” the lawsuit said. Several courts have struck down similar in-state tuition laws as unconstitutional.

For instance, earlier this month, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a case filed by the Trump administration that Texas cannot offer in-state college tuition to illegal immigrants under its Dream Act, ruling that federal law overrides state policy.

In the Colorado lawsuit, the DOJ asked the court to enter a judgment declaring that the state’s Advancing Students for a Stronger Tomorrow Act violates the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. It asked the court to issue a permanent injunction prohibiting the defendants from enforcing the Act or any similar statute.

Defendants in the lawsuit include the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, the Colorado Department of Higher Education, and its executive director.

In a July 23 statement, the DOJ said that the lawsuit against Colorado was the 14th case filed by the department challenging in-state tuition policies for illegal immigrants.

“By granting illegal aliens in-state tuition, Colorado is violating federal law and subsidizing education for illegal aliens at the taxpayers’ expense,” Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward, Jr. said in the statement.

“This Department will not cease until President [Donald] Trump’s promise is fulfilled: illegal aliens will not receive benefits denied to our Nation’s own citizens.”

The Epoch Times reached out to the Colorado governor and the Colorado Department of Higher Education for comments, but did not receive a response by publication time.

In addition to Texas, the Trump administration has succeeded in getting permanent injunctions against in-state tuition benefits for illegal immigrants in Kentucky, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.

Cases filed against California, Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Kansas, and Minnesota are pending.

Meanwhile, the DOJ announced in a July 24 statement that the District Court for the Southern District of Illinois ruled in favor of the federal government in a lawsuit against Illinois’s in-state tuition benefits for illegal immigrants.

The case was filed in September 2025, with the state subsequently filing a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The DOJ said that Illinois chose to give preferential treatment to illegal immigrants while not extending that treatment to Americans outside Illinois.

“This ruling enforces the statute Congress wrote and stops the State from putting illegal aliens ahead of American citizens,” U.S. Attorney Steven D. Weinhoeft said in the statement.

In a July 23 fact sheet update, the National Immigration Law Center stated that adoption of “tuition equity” laws and policies across various states suggests that such actions help both U.S. citizens and immigrants of all statuses by reducing high school dropout rates and increasing the number of students pursuing college degrees.