Minnesota triumphs over Trump in lawsuit on illegal immigration tuition

A federal judge has sided with Minnesota in ruling that the state’s policy of offering in-state tuition rates to illegal immigrant college students isn’t trumped by federal law.

That federal law generally says states can’t offer a special rate to illegal immigrants who reside in a state unless they also allow the same rates to be paid by anyone — including those from other U.S. states.

U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez, though, said Minnesota’s law ties the special rates to a student having attended high school in the state. It doesn’t specifically require state residency.

And because that means someone who lives outside of the state could qualify, it doesn’t run afoul of the federal law.

“Under Minnesota’s statutory scheme, nonresidents can — and do — qualify for resident tuition: by living in a neighboring state and attending Minnesota high schools, attending a Minnesota boarding school, or attending and graduating from a Minnesota high school before moving out of state,” wrote Judge Menendez, a Biden appointee.

The ruling is the latest in a string of losses for the Trump administration in its attempt to wield federal laws to try to suppress state policies that offer special leniency to illegal immigrants.

Orders to deny sanctuary jurisdictions federal funding have been blocked by other courts. And an attempt to shut down New York’s law prohibiting arrests at state courthouses failed late last year.

The administration has had some success in knocking down in-state tuition policies in Texas and Oklahoma, but those were instances where the state officials agreed with the feds and entered into consent decrees to invalidate their own policies.

Judge Menendez said the Oklahoma case didn’t get into the merits of the federal law.

The Texas case did, but Judge Menendez said that state’s law differed from Minnesota’s because Texas specifically tied tuition rates to state residency, rather than school location.