The College Discount Controversy - 9/15/26

Hawaii, Arkansas, and Utah offer in-state tuition discounts to illegal immigrants, and the Justice Department is taking them to federal court. In a lawsuit filed on September 10, the Department of Justice said these three states and the District of Columbia are violating federal law by favoring illegal immigrants with discounted tuition over American citizens who are from other states. Now, it is a common practice for state universities to offer reduced tuition to residents of their own state, as Generation of taxpayers have invested in their own state's university system.

American citizens from other states naturally don't get that discounted rate. At issue here is when the University of Utah would charge a higher tuition to a citizen from Georgia than they would an illegal immigrant who snuck into the country illegally from Honduras. The lawsuits extend a legal strategy that has already produced rulings against several states, most recently Nebraska, where a federal judge in June permanently barred the state of Nebraska from enforcing a 2006 law that let illegal immigrant students qualify for in-state tuition if they had graduated from a Nebraska high school and lived in the state at least three years.

More on this to come. Meanwhile, over at The Loop, a group of Chicago-based Catholics have succeeded in securing a reprieve from an Illinois assisted suicide law, with a federal court barring the state from enforcing the law against Catholic objectors. Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. The Church placed this feast immediately after the exaltation of the cross to connect Mary's suffering directly to the sacrifice of Jesus. I'm Josh Mercer, editor of The Loop, taking you behind the headlines. Go to zeal.co for the rest of today's Loop, and while you're at it, subscribe to get The Loop in your inbox every morning. Again, that's zeal.co.