More than 408,000 students enrolled in American colleges and universities in 2021 were living in the country illegally, a new report has found.
The vast majority (77.1 percent) of these students are enrolled in public two- and four-year colleges and universities, with a significant proportion of them attending community colleges, the report’s publishers said.
Reflecting trends of the illegal immigrant population in America, these students are concentrated in a small number of states, the report noted. An estimated 313,000, or three-quarters of them, are attending colleges in 12 states, and most of those live in California (83,000), Texas (59,000), Florida (40,000), and New York (30,000).
When it comes to racial demographics, Hispanic students account for 45.7 percent of all illegal immigrants students, followed by Asian students (27.2 percent), black students (14 percent), and white students (10 percent).
Over one-third (34 percent) of the students were illegally brought into the United States before age 10, while 42.2 percent arrived between the ages of 10 and 16. The other 23.8 percent illegally came to the country as adults.
The advocacy groups also noted that the 2021 figure represents a 4.2 percent decrease from the 427,000 illegal immigrant college students found participating in the 2019 system. They attributed the decline to public health distractions and economic hardships stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as ongoing legal challenges to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
About 141,000 illegal immigrant students are eligible for or enrolled in DACA, according to the report.
Established in 2012 by the Obama administration with a memo from the secretary of Homeland Security, DACA provides protection from deportation for people who were illegally brought into the country as children. The program does not grant them legal residential status or a pathway to citizenship, but it does allow them to apply for a driver’s license, social security number, and a renewable work permit.
As of 2023, DACA has survived several rounds of legal challenges although its scope has been greatly reduced.
In 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared DACA unconstitutional, saying that former President Barack Obama overstepped his executive authority in providing illegal immigrants with “unilateral executive amnesty.” The decision to end DACA was overturned three years later by the U.S. Supreme Court, with the chief justice siding with the court’s four liberal-leaning members to form a thin 5-4 majority.
The legality of DACA was also challenged in court in 2018 by a coalition of nine states led by Texas. The program, the states claimed, was causing irreparable harm by forcing them to bear extra costs in terms of health care, education, and law enforcement. They also argued that the Obama administration didn’t use the right legal procedure to create the program in the first place.
In 2021, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen of Texas partially sided with suing states. His decision allowed current recipients to renew their DACA status but blocked the federal government from granting new DACA applications.
The 2021 ruling was appealed and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision. However, the case is now back to Judge Hanen’s court after the Biden administration officially incorporated DACA into federal regulation. This new version of DACA took effect in October 2022 and was subject to public comment as part of the formal rule-making process.
Judge Hanen heard arguments in June. The nine states, namely Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia, argued during the hearing that their residents are having to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in health care, education, and other areas to support DACA recipients being allowed to remain in the country illegally.
One the other hand, attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice, DACA recipients, and the state of New Jersey claimed that the suing states failed to prove that any of the costs they allegedly incurred have anything to do with DACA.
The judge, appointed by President George W. Bush, has yet to give a timeframe for when he will issue a ruling.
