The U.S. Department of Justice sued Colorado’s higher education agencies in federal court, alleging the state broke federal law by offering in-state tuition rates and taxpayer-funded financial aid to illegal immigrants enrolled at public colleges and universities. The lawsuit, the 14th such action filed by the Trump administration, names the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, the Colorado Department of Higher Education, and its director, JB Holston, as defendants.
At the center of the complaint is Colorado’s ASSET Act and related state policies, which the DOJ says violate a federal statute that has been on the books for roughly three decades. That law prohibits states from granting higher education benefits to illegal immigrants based on residency unless those same benefits are extended to every U.S. citizen, including students from other states.
In plain terms: Colorado charges out-of-state American citizens more to attend its public universities than it charges illegal immigrants who happen to live within the state’s borders. The DOJ says that arrangement is unlawful and unconstitutional.
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward laid out the administration’s position in blunt language. As Fox News Digital reported, Woodward said:
“For three decades, Congress has made clear that Colorado cannot give education benefits to illegal aliens that it does not give to all American citizens. By granting illegal aliens in-state tuition, Colorado is not only violating federal law but subsidizing education for illegal aliens at taxpayers’ expense.”
Woodward did not stop there. He tied the enforcement action directly to President Trump’s broader immigration agenda:
“Our litigation efforts will not cease until we have fulfilled President Trump’s promise that illegal aliens will not obtain preferential treatment over our nation’s own citizens.”
The DOJ’s institutional statement echoed that theme, declaring: “This Department of Justice is committed to fulfilling President Trump’s promise that illegal aliens will not obtain taxpayer benefits or preferential treatment over our own citizens.”
The complaint doesn’t just challenge the existence of in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. It details how Colorado steadily weakened the guardrails around eligibility. The DOJ alleges Colorado reduced the high school attendance requirement from three years to just one year. The state also removed a rule requiring students to enroll in college within 12 months of graduating high school.
Perhaps most telling, Colorado repealed a requirement that illegal immigrant students submit an affidavit stating they had applied for lawful immigration status, or would do so as soon as they were eligible. In other words, the state dropped even the pretense of encouraging legal residency.
Each change made it easier for illegal immigrants to access discounted tuition and state-funded scholarships, benefits denied to American citizens living in neighboring states like Kansas, Nebraska, or Wyoming who might want to attend a Colorado public university.
The DOJ’s lawsuit asks the court to declare several Colorado state laws unconstitutional and to award court fees. The specific statutes targeted and the case docket number were not identified in available reporting.
A spokesperson for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis dismissed the lawsuit. “The federal government seizing control of determining in-state tuition across the country is absurd,” the spokesperson said. The governor’s office framed Colorado’s policies as an investment in workforce development: “In Colorado, we are expanding access to education to provide students with the skills to get good-paying jobs and doubling down on strategies to save students money.”
That framing sidesteps the core legal question. The issue isn’t whether Colorado can set its own tuition policies. It’s whether the state can offer benefits to illegal immigrants that it denies to American citizens from other states, a practice Congress specifically prohibited.
Neither the Colorado Commission on Higher Education nor the Colorado Department of Higher Education had responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.
The Colorado action is the 14th lawsuit the Trump administration has filed challenging in-state tuition policies for illegal immigrants. The campaign has already produced results elsewhere. Nebraska ended in-state tuition benefits for illegal immigrants under a deal with the DOJ, though the specific terms of that agreement were not detailed.
The administration’s legal offensive extends beyond tuition disputes. The DOJ has also challenged sanctuary policies in states like Minnesota, where a Trump-appointed judge dismissed a related lawsuit, a reminder that federal courts don’t always side with the administration, even when the legal arguments carry weight.
Still, the sheer volume of cases, 14 and counting on tuition alone, signals that the DOJ intends to press the issue state by state until the practice ends or the courts draw a definitive line.
The legal landscape around DOJ enforcement actions has been anything but predictable in recent months. A federal judge recently halted a major DOJ funding initiative in a separate matter, underscoring how federal courts remain a contested battleground for the administration’s priorities.
The policy Colorado defends creates a straightforward inequity. An American family in Omaha or Cheyenne that sends a child to the University of Colorado pays out-of-state tuition, often tens of thousands of dollars more per year than in-state rates. An illegal immigrant living in Denver, under Colorado’s current law, pays the lower in-state rate and may qualify for state-funded scholarships on top of that.
The DOJ’s complaint frames this as an unconstitutional preference: lower tuition and state scholarships for illegal immigrants, higher costs for American citizens. The federal statute at issue was designed to prevent exactly this outcome.
Gov. Polis’s office calls the federal action “absurd.” But the law Congress passed didn’t leave much room for ambiguity. States can offer whatever tuition rates they choose, as long as they don’t give illegal immigrants a better deal than they give to citizens of other states.
Colorado chose to do precisely that, and then systematically removed the safeguards that might have limited the practice. The DOJ noticed.
Meanwhile, the broader question of how far federal courts will allow the administration to push remains open. Judges have delivered mixed results across the DOJ’s expanding docket. In one recent case, an Obama-appointed judge sanctioned a Trump-aligned legal filing in an unrelated matter, a sign that not every courtroom will be friendly terrain.
And in another high-profile proceeding, a federal judge ordered the DOJ to unseal redacted files in a separate case, illustrating the judiciary’s willingness to push back on executive branch discretion when it sees fit.
The lawsuit now moves through Colorado federal court. The state will have to mount a legal defense for a policy that, on its face, gives illegal immigrants a financial advantage over law-abiding American citizens from other states. Whether Colorado’s “workforce development” argument survives contact with the plain text of federal law remains to be seen.
Thirteen prior lawsuits suggest the administration won’t lose interest. And the Nebraska deal shows that some states, when pressed, would rather settle than fight.
When a state charges an American family from next door more than it charges someone who entered the country illegally, it shouldn’t take a federal lawsuit to see the problem. But apparently, it does.
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