CHALLENGE TO PUBLIC SCHOOL FOR ALL EYED
Abbott: Educating unauthorized migrants a burden
With the Supreme Court signaling a willingness to reverse decades-old precedents like the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said Thursday that he would seek to overturn a 1982 court decision that obligated public schools to educate all children, including immigrants living in the country illegally.
Abbott’s comments opened a new front in his campaign to use his powers as governor to harden Texas against unauthorized migration. And they demonstrated just how expansively some conservatives are thinking when it comes to the kinds of changes to American life that the court’s emboldened conservative majority may be willing to allow.
The latest proposal for closing public schools to unauthorized immigrant children significantly widens the range of precedents up for debate. After a draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade leaked this week, focus had been primarily on other rights that could be legally linked to the 1973 decision, such as access to contraception and same-sex marriage.
Little has changed in the legal landscape surrounding the education of unauthorized immigrant children since 1982, when the court issued
a 5-4 decision to strike down a Texas law allowing schools to refuse admission to them, legal experts said. Several attempts over the years to chip away at the decision in the case known as Plyler v. Doe have been unsuccessful, including an effort by Alabama more than a decade ago and in California in the 1990s.
What has shifted is the composition of the court and, Abbott said, the number of new migrants arriving from a diverse range of countries, a situation that he said had placed an “extraordinary” burden on Texas schools. The migrants now arriving speak many different languages, “not just Spanish,” he said. The governor said educating unauthorized immigrant children would soon become “unsustainable and unaffordable” if the federal government lifts its pandemic policy of turning back many migrants at the border,
known as Title 42.
Abbott, a Republican running for a third term, said Wednesday during a radio interview that he would “resurrect” the Plyler case and “challenge this issue again,” though he did not give a time frame for doing so. Asked about his comments at a news conference Thursday, the governor, a former attorney general of Texas, provided details of his argument.
“The real crux of the challenge would be to say, listen, we are dealing with billions more a year just in education expenses, so you, the federal government, it’s only because of you, and it’s your responsibility to pay for that,” Abbott said.
He added that he would like to see the Supreme Court reverse another precedent, Arizona v. United States, that in 2012 held that authority over immigration enforcement belongs to the federal government and not the states.
“Either the Arizona decision will have to go — giving states full authority to enforce U.S. immigration laws — or Plyler will have to go,” Abbott said, adding he would prefer to see both overturned.
It was not clear by what means he planned to move forward with a legal challenge.
The Plyler case grew out of a 1975 law, passed by the Texas Legislature, that barred the allocation of funds for the education of noncitizens and allowed school districts to deny enrollment to unauthorized migrant children.
Under the law, a school district in the East Texas town of Tyler began charging $1,000 in annual tuition for unauthorized migrant children. The move was challenged all the way to the Supreme Court.
The decision was close, with the five justices in the majority determining that the Texas law had violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The court found it would cause “lifelong hardship” to the children, who were being punished for the actions of their parents, and concluded that allowing the law to stand could create a “shadow population” whose children would not be in schools. Even the dissenting justices agreed that the Texas law was bad policy.