Jan Resseger looks at the latest attempt by this administration to make immigrants’ lives more difficult. Reposted with permission.
When he spoke to a group of Texas state legislators gathered in Washington, D.C. last week, Stephen Miller demonstrated that the Trump administration is turning up the heat to induce the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the 1982 decision in Plyler v. Doe. He proved that ending the Plyler decision’s protection of public schooling for immigrant children is not merely a priority of the Heritage Foundation.
Stephen Miller is President Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff for policy and a homeland security advisor.
The 1982 U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Plyler v. Doe overturned a 1975, Texas law that blocked undocumented immigrant children from local public schools unless their parents paid $1,000 per child in tuition. After the public schools in Tyler, Texas began turning away local children, a lawsuit challenged the Texas statute, a lawsuit which eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In the 1982 decision in Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court protected the right to free K-12 public schooling for all children living in the United States.
The NY Times Lauren McGaughy reports that, “Stephen Miller raised the idea of ending public education funding for undocumented children in a closed-door meeting with Texas lawmakers in Washington last week, a move that would challenge a decades-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent… Mr. Miller, President Trump’s hard-line immigration adviser… encouraged the state lawmakers to pass… legislation on immigration and other issues that are crucial to Republicans….”
Also last week, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) led a meeting of the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government to consider the impact of Plyler v. Doe. At the hearing, Roy declared: “It’s time we meet the moment to overturn Plyler v. Doe… It’s time for Congress and the courts to address the glaring failures of this court decision and finally alleviate Texans and Americans alike from this burden.” Roy explained that taxpayers should not have to pay for the public schooling of undocumented students. The Dallas television reporter covering Roy’s meeting explains that a bill violating the Plyler decision was introduced recently in the Texas legislature, but never made it out of committee. A similar bill, Ohio House Bill 42, has been introduced in the current session of Ohio’s legislature.
So… what’s going on here? The president of First Focus on Children, Bruce Lesley explains: “(S)ince early 2025, lawmakers in six states have introduced legislation to restrict or eliminate children’s access to a public education—legislation deliberately designed, as the Heritage Foundation openly acknowledges, to manufacture a test case or ‘trigger law’ that could bring Plyler before today’s Supreme Court in an effort to overturn the landmark decision protecting the education of all children.”
Advocates for children and advocates for justice are pushing back. In a letter submitted last week to Rep. Chip Roy’s subcommittee, the National Education Association provided a mass of demographic and fiscal data to respond to the Heritage Foundation’s and Stephen Miller’s arguments about how expensive Plyler is for states and local school districts: “Over the last 40 years, more than 4.8 million undocumented children have benefited…. Specifically, providing access to a free public K-12 education, (Plyler) has: generated $633 billion in state and local tax revenues above and beyond education costs; increased our nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by nearly $3 trillion; prevented 730,000 U.S. children from falling into poverty, strengthened the U.S. workforce by allowing more than 350,000 people to work in jobs typically requiring some college education; (and) averted nearly $30 billion in health care costs….”
More urgently important, however, is Bruce Lesley’s in-depth exploration of the injustice being promoted by Stephen Miller last week.
Lesley gets to the heart of the matter: “We should call efforts to overturn Plyler for what they are: cruelty. And it is a cruelty that the opponents of Plyler have tried to dress up as fiscal prudence or immigration enforcement. It is none of those things. It is the deliberate punishment of children for circumstances entirely beyond their control, which is precisely what the Supreme Court of the United States said… ‘does not comport with fundamental conceptions of Justice.’ ”
Lesley continues: “(Justice William) Brennan explained this point in the Plyler opinion: ‘The children of those illegal entrants are not comparably situated.’ Their ‘parents have the ability to conform their conduct to societal norms,’ and presumably the ability to remove themselves from the State’s jurisdiction; but the children who are plaintiffs in these cases ‘can affect neither their parents’ conduct nor their own status.’ Even if the State found it expedient to control the conduct of adults by acting against their children, legislation directing the onus of a parent’s misconduct against his children does not comport with fundamental conceptions of justice.”
Lesley concludes: “Condemning children to illiteracy is a dehumanizing act that strikes at the nation’s soul… Justice Brennan did not mince words: ‘The Texas law imposes a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status… The inability to read and write will handicap the individual deprived of a basic education each and every day of his life.’… The Fourteenth Amendment was designed, among other things to prevent the creation of permanent castes in American society… This is what the Heritage Foundation’s proposal amounts to: the deliberate, legally-sanctioned creation of a generation of children purposely denied an education within American borders… The model state legislation that Heritage has proposed is not designed to improve schools, save money, or even reduce immigration. It is designed to harm children and generate a lawsuit. The children who would be turned away from school under the Heritage Foundation’s proposal would be collateral damage….”
If you haven’t seen Bruce Lesley’s excellent analysis, please take the time to read it.