‘Dreamers’ bracing for big jump in tuition costs

David Montenegro worked parttime restaurant jobs and took advantage of Arizona’s lower in-state tuition as he labored through years of college. Now a senior with the goal of becoming a teacher nearly in sight, Montenegro, a 29-year-old Mexico-born immigrant who arrived in the U.S. at age 11, faces a new hurdle.

Montenegro and more than 2,300 public college students around Arizona with deferred deportation status will have to pay thousands more for school in the fall under a state Supreme Court decision that deemed them ineligible for in-state tuition. Suddenly, they are scrambling to piece

together private funding to continue their studies.

Students in the U.S. illegally cannot get federal funding, but there are private scholarships such as The Dream.US Golden Doors Scholars scholarship for students covered by the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA. Youths in the program are sometimes referred to as “dreamers” for the DREAM Act, never-passed legislation that opponents say would reward people for breaking the law and encourage illegal immigration.

Montenegro said Arizona State University counselors helped him find modest funding from donors to finish his last year, and “I should be able to do it.”

But he and others said they fear a growing anti-immigrant bias in the U.S. under President Donald Trump, who has made tough immigration policies a key focus.

“It’s upsetting to know there are people out there trying to make our lives impossible,” Montenegro said.

Vasthy Lamadrid, another DACA recipient in ASU’s teaching program, acknowledged experiencing “a lot of anxiety and stress” after the decision.

“Some students are freaking out, wondering if they need to move out of state or find other funding,” the 22-yearold added.

The Arizona Attorney General’s Office sued the Maricopa Community College District in 2013, saying that extending in-state tuition to DACA recipients violated a 2006 voter initiative that requires people to have lawful immigration status to get public benefits.

The state Supreme Court ruled in April that state and federal law do not allow DACA recipients to get Arizona’s in-state tuition because they are not lawfully present in the U.S.

Although federal law does not prevent unauthorized immigrants from attending public universities, state laws vary on whether those who graduated from state high schools get in-state tuition rates. The National Conference of State Legislatures says 20 states offer in-state tuition to unauthorized immigrants — 16 of them through legislative action in places including California, Kansas and New York. In Hawaii, Michigan, Oklahoma and Rhode Island, the lower rate is granted through the state university systems.

In New Mexico, Western New Mexico University has used social media to woo high-achieving immigrants, extending in-state tuition to DACA recipients from Arizona, Colorado and El Paso.

But Georgia considers students covered by DACA ineligible for in-state tuition, a policy explored in “The Unafraid,” a new documentary taking its name from an activist chant, “Undocumented! Unafraid!”

Screening next month at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York, the movie follows three DACA recipients in Georgia hoping to go to college.

Their challenges are similar to those now faced by Arizona DACA recipients, who mostly come from lower-income families and often don’t graduate until they are in their mid-20s or older because they can pay for only a class or two at a time.

The annual tuition for an estimated 300 DACA recipients at Arizona’s three public universities will rise from about $10,000 to $15,000 under a policy of charging non-citizen residents 150 percent of in-state tuition.

Some 2,000 students with DACA status at the Maricopa County Community College District, the largest in Arizona and among the biggest in the U.S., will see annual costs for a fulltime course load jump from about $2,580 to $8,900.