The U.S. Department of Justice sued Colorado on Thursday for offering in-state tuition rates to undocumented students who live in the state, the latest turn in an ongoing effort by the Trump administration to end such tuition breaks for students who are in the country illegally.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, takes aim at a 2013 state law — Advancing Students for a Stronger Tomorrow — that allows undocumented students living in Colorado to pay in-state tuition rates, which are significantly cheaper than rates for out-of-state students. The law also allows such students to receive in-state financial aid.
The DOJ argues that federal law forbids giving undocumented students in-state tuition rates, because such tuition rates are not available to all U.S. citizens. Citizens who live outside of Colorado do not qualify for in-state tuition, and that makes offering the rates to undocumented students unconstitutional, the DOJ argued.
“These statutes constitute blatant unequal treatment favoring illegal aliens over U.S. citizens,” the complaint reads. “Worse, such preferential treatment is squarely prohibited and preempted by Congress.”
The state law, known as ASSET, says undocumented students can qualify for in-state tuition if they graduated from a Colorado high school or lived in the state for at least a year before passing a high-school equivalency exam, and have lived in the state for at least 12 consecutive months before enrolling in the institution.
Lawrence Pacheco, a spokesman for Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, declined to comment on the lawsuit Thursday.
U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, who signed the 2013 bill into law when he was Colorado’s governor, decried the lawsuit in a statement Thursday.
“Instead of actually working to fix our broken immigration system, the Trump administration is trying to reignite yesterday’s culture wars,” Hickenlooper said in the statement. “These young people, many of whom have never had a home other than Colorado, want an education so they can build their lives.”
The bill was co-sponsored by then-senator and Denver’s now-Mayor Mike Johnston, who on Thursday said it was the very reason he entered politics in the first place.
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Johnston, a former teacher and principal, recalled seeing salutatorians and valedictorians with tears in their eyes because they lacked legal status and could not afford to pay out-of-state tuition to go to college in Colorado.
“There’s no way Colorado is going to go back to that time,” he said.
He urged students not to back down, vowing that city, state and higher education leaders will come together to fight the Trump administration’s lawsuit.
“We are all on your side, and we are going to stay by your side the whole way through this,” Johnston said. “Don’t skip an hour of studying to worry about this nonsense, because we will take care of it.”
The federal government recently brought similar challenges to tuition breaks for undocumented students in Texas, Kentucky, Minnesota and Oklahoma as part of the Trump administration’s broader crackdown on immigration. Florida in 2025 repealed its 2014 law allowing undocumented students to qualify for in-state tuition.
The DOJ found success in Texas, where a federal appeals court this month upheld a ruling that ended the state’s 24-year-old law allowing some undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates. The ruling, which applied only in Texas, was seen as an opening for conservatives to challenge similar laws across the country.
A federal judge in Oklahoma ended the practice there after a DOJ lawsuit, and Kentucky officials agreed to stop offering in-state tuition to undocumented students after the DOJ filed suit.
In March, a federal judge in Minnesota dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit there, finding that the DOJ failed to prove that the in-state tuition offering discriminated against U.S. citizens.
It was not immediately clear how many college students in Colorado are undocumented. The Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration — a group of college presidents and higher education leaders — estimates Colorado has about 6,700 undocumented students in higher education.
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