STATE COLLEGE, Pennsylvania — The U.S. Department of Justice sued Pennsylvania State University on Thursday, November 5, asking a federal court to block the university's policy of offering in-state tuition rates to undocumented students who meet its residency rules. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, names the university and its Board of Trustees as defendants.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice via The Digital Free Press
The Associated Press reported the filing is part of a sweeping campaign by President Donald Trump's administration against tuition breaks for students in the country illegally. Two dozen states once offered such breaks, often with bipartisan support, but after the Justice Department began suing last year the policies ended in Kentucky, Illinois, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and Florida. More recent challenges have targeted individual schools, including a lawsuit filed last month against the University of Delaware.
Source: Associated Press
What Penn State's policy says — in the university's own words
The 14-page complaint quotes Penn State's own guidance to students: "Undocumented students, with or without DACA, can be eligible for in-state tuition if they meet Penn State's residency requirements." Under the filing, those requirements include attending an accredited Pennsylvania high school for at least four years and graduating, or earning a Pennsylvania GED. "Nothing in the Undocumented Student Policy's criteria requires lawful presence in the United States for in-state tuition eligibility," the department wrote.
At Penn State's Commonwealth Campuses, the complaint puts a Pennsylvania resident's yearly costs at $34,452 to $41,180, against $44,454 to $54,196 for non-residents. At the main-campus rates in the filing, the gap is worth roughly $95,000 or more across a four-year degree — the difference, for many families, between a student enrolling and not enrolling at all.
The 1996 law at the centre of the case
The case turns on a 1996 federal law, 8 U.S.C. 1623(a), which says a person "who is not lawfully present in the United States shall not be eligible on the basis of residence within a State" for "any postsecondary education benefit" unless a U.S. citizen is eligible for the same benefit "without regard to whether the citizen or national is such a resident." The complaint adds: "There are no exceptions." The department makes a second argument under 8 U.S.C. 1621(d): a state can extend public benefits to people who are not lawfully present only through a state law enacted after 1996, and Penn State's rule, the complaint says, "is not an enactment of state law" — a ground on which it cites a March 2026 ruling against a Kentucky regulation.
The United States asks the court to declare the policy preempted and unconstitutional under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, and to permanently bar the university from enforcing it "or any similar subsequent policy." The complaint is signed by Brian D. Miller, U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, and Brett A. Shumate, Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department's Civil Division.
"Congress long ago made clear that states, through their public universities, cannot give reduced tuition to illegal aliens not available to all Americans," Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. said in the department's release. "The Department of Justice today continues its efforts to ensure that no state law or university policy gives preferential treatment to illegal aliens over our Nation's own citizens."
The other side of the argument
A Penn State spokesperson told the Associated Press and the student newspaper Onward State that the university was aware of the complaint and reviewing it. The university has not been found liable by any court: the filing opens the dispute rather than resolving it. Supporters of tuition breaks argue, the AP reported, that the policies do not violate federal law if they give the same rates to U.S. citizens in the same circumstances — state residents who graduated from one of its high schools — and that many of the students affected were brought to the United States by their parents as children and are as much a part of their communities as their citizen classmates.
Why it matters in Pennsylvania — and to diaspora families
Pennsylvania is home to large immigrant communities, including a growing Punjabi population in the Harrisburg, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas, and Penn State is one of the state's biggest draws for international students — students from Punjab pay the top, non-resident band in the complaint's figures. The case does not change any student's bill today, but it will decide whether residency-based help at a public university can include undocumented classmates who grew up in Pennsylvania, and its reasoning will be watched by public universities across the country.
What happens next: Penn State must answer the complaint in federal court in the Middle District of Pennsylvania, and a judge will decide whether the policy can stay while the case runs. The department said six of its earlier suits — in Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Illinois and Kansas — have already produced orders permanently blocking similar policies, which is the outcome it is seeking here. No court date or ruling had been announced as of Thursday night.