FRANKFORT, Kentucky – A Latino civil rights organization filed an appeal today from a district court decision to allow Kentucky to eliminate regular tuition rates for students without lawful immigration status living in the state.
In November, MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund) was allowed to intervene in a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) challenging a Kentucky regulation that allowed undocumented students who graduate from Kentucky high schools to pay tuition equivalent to the rate paid by most students at the state’s public colleges and universities. MALDEF represents Kentucky Students for Affordable Tuition (KSAT), an unincorporated association of college students without lawful immigration status who qualified for regular tuition rates under the long-standing Kentucky policy. At issue is a lawsuit filed on June 17, 2025, by the DOJ, which sought to invalidate the 2002 regulation.
“There is no supportable legal basis for the court’s approval of the collusive consent decree agreement between the state and the Trump administration,” said Thomas A. Saenz, MALDEF president and general counsel. “The consent decree violates the right of Kentucky to set its own policies in this area.”
On March 31, U.S. District Court Judge Gregory F. Van Tatenhove, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, Frankfort Division, signed a consent decree — an agreement between the federal government and the Kentucky defendants — rescinding the Kentucky regulation and enjoining the state from enforcing it on the grounds that it violates the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
“For over twenty years, students qualified for the regular tuition rate at Kentucky’s public universities if they graduated from a Kentucky high school regardless of immigration status. The students of KSAT merely seek to be treated the same as their peers.” said MALDEF staff attorney Olivia Alden. “With this appeal, we hope the Sixth Circuit will recognize that the State of Kentucky, through an affirmative enactment of state law, ensured that all Kentucky high school graduates are eligible for the regular tuition rate.”
In their motion to intervene, attorneys argued that without the regulation, tuition for these students could jump by up to 152 percent—from $446 to $897 per semester credit hour—potentially forcing many to withdraw from their degree programs or abandon their plans entirely.
The DOJ’s lawsuit in Kentucky used a legal theory similar to one used by the federal government last year to collude with the Texas attorney general to strike down Texas’s tuition policy for undocumented students living in that state. MALDEF’s request to intervene in Texas was denied, and the decision is now on appeal. Additionally, MALDEF is seeking to defend regular tuition in Oklahoma.
The Kentucky decision is being appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. A notice of appeal was filed in the District Court in Frankfort, Kentucky.