The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has filed a brief in Minnesota federal district court in support of the Trump administration’s lawsuit to shut down Minnesota’s law granting in-state tuition to illegal aliens who live in the state.
Not only does Minnesota let illegal aliens attend its public universities, but it lets illegals who live in the state pay only in-state tuition, while charging American citizens from out of state much higher tuition.
Congress has passed a law against this practice, giving Americans from any state an entitlement to pay the same in-state tuition to another state’s public universities as illegal aliens who live in that state pay based on their residence.
Minnesota has tried to get around this law with a clever device. It claims it does not base in-state tuition on residence in the state, but on whether a student has gone to high school in the state. Accordingly, it charges out-of-staters full tuition, and resident illegal aliens much lower in-state tuition, all while supposedly not basing any of this on what state a person lives in (as opposed to goes to high school in).
As FAIR argues in its brief, however, in the overwhelming majority of cases, students go to high school in the state they live in, making state of high school attendance almost an exact stand-in for state of residence. This near-equivalence means that Minnesota blatantly interferes with Congress’s purposes in the federal statute by going on charging resident illegal aliens in-state tuition while charging non-resident Americans out-of-state tuition.
“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 Christopher J. Hajec, deputy general counsel of FAIR. “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.”
The case is United States v. Walz, No. 0:25-cv-02668 (D. Minn.)
