The Justice Department is trying to price this state’s own kids out of college. At the University of Delaware, in-state tuition is roughly seventeen thousand dollars a year. Out-of-state tuition runs about forty. The department’s twenty-sixth lawsuit asks a federal judge to force every undocumented student who grew up in Delaware to pay the out-of-state rate — and that twenty-three-thousand-dollar annual spread is more than my household takes home in two and a half months after taxes.
I keep waiting for somebody in this argument to say that number out loud. Nobody does. The Justice Department calls it “preferential treatment.” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. said this week that the department’s efforts “will not cease until we have challenged every state law or university policy that gives preferential treatment to illegal aliens over nation’s own citizens.” What that means in dollars a family can feel: a kid who went to Delaware schools for three years, who lived with her parents in Wilmington, who graduated from a Delaware high school, who is actively pursuing citizenship — that kid now faces a tuition bill twenty-three thousand dollars higher than the one every other kid she graduated with will pay. She did not move to Delaware. She grew up there. The state paid for her K-12 education. The state graduated her. And now the federal government is telling her that the state’s flagship university is not for her — not because of her grades, not because of her work, but because of what her parents were when they crossed a line she had no say in.
The department has been building toward this since the summer. Maryland in July, then New York, Connecticut, and Vermont, then more states, then four more suits in September. Twenty-six in roughly eighteen months, building on an April 2025 executive order directing the attorney general to stop any policy that “favors aliens over any groups of American citizens.” What changed this week is the target — the department stopped suing the legislature that wrote the law and started suing the university board that implements it. That matters not because of some grand legal theory. I am not a lawyer, and this is not a legal analysis. It matters because of what it feels like on the other end.
I have two kids in the Philadelphia public schools. Four and one. I sit at the kitchen table most nights doing the math on what it costs to raise them here — the daycare invoice, the mortgage at seven percent, the student loans, the school supplies. And when I look across the table at David and say, “Do you know what twenty-three thousand dollars a year means?”, he does. Because that is most of what we pay for childcare in a year. That is more than we pay for health insurance. That is a car. That is the difference between a family that can save for retirement and a family that cannot.
Now multiply that by every undocumented kid who grew up in Delaware, and imagine the government is the one imposing it.
Here is the part I cannot get past: the state already paid for these kids. Delaware spent roughly fifteen thousand dollars a year educating them through K-12. That is Delaware’s money — property taxes, state aid, the whole grinding apparatus my mother’s generation paid into through parish-school fundraisers and school-tax bills. The state made that investment. The kid grew up here because the state let her. She graduated here. And now the federal government is saying: you do not get to finish. You do not get to stay in the system the state already paid for. The state educated her for free, and now she has to leave — or pay forty thousand dollars a year to stay.
You know who spent decades writing about exactly this pattern? Jonathan Kozol. The state, he argued, requires attendance but refuses to require equity — and in doing so effectively requires inequality. The state of Delaware required this kid to attend school. The state of Delaware graduated her. And now the federal government says the state’s flagship university is not available to her at the rate the state itself set. That is Kozol’s argument, running on a national scale, enforced by the Justice Department.
And here is what the department’s lawyers will not say, because it does not serve their case: the research is not contested. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the Migration Policy Institute, a long list of state fiscal offices — undocumented students who complete college pay significantly more in taxes over their lifetimes than they consume in public services. Every state that has studied this has found the same thing. The kids being priced out of Delaware’s flagship are the kids the state already invested in, and they are the kids who would pay the state back the most. The tuition bill the Justice Department wants to impose is not just an insult to a seventeen-year-old. It is the state shooting itself in the foot and calling it federal law.
There is a Swift song I keep coming back to in moments like this. It is called “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” and the title line is, I have argued before, the most honest statement of American care infrastructure ever committed to a pop album. The song is about a girl who gave everything to a system that did not give back. And the redemption in it — the only redemption in it — is lateral. Not the institution. Not the government. Not the policy. The other people in the same position, reaching for each other. The friendship bracelets. The group text. That is what is left when every institution that was supposed to catch you decides you are not worth the catch.
I think about the kids in Delaware’s public schools right now. They are in third grade, in eighth grade, in their senior year of high school. Some of them know that this lawsuit exists. Some of them do not yet. The ones who do are learning something their textbooks will not tell them: that the state that educated them does not consider them one of its own. That the only thing standing between them and a college education is a Justice Department that would rather spend its time filing twenty-six lawsuits than figuring out how to keep talented kids in the state that raised them.
There is no shopping-around answer to that. There is no “choice” the editorial pages are talking about. There is a number — twenty-three thousand dollars a year — and there is a government trying to impose it on children because it does not like who their parents are. My kids will not face this particular policy. They were born here. Their paperwork is clean. But I sit at the kitchen table every night doing the math on what it costs to raise them, and I know this: the tuition bill is the same tuition bill. It is the same number, the same gap between what work pays and what raising a kid costs.
Woodward has said the department’s efforts “will not cease.” That is not my prediction; it is his statement. And I want him to know something, and I want every parent in a Delaware school district to know it too: the state of Delaware already spent the money. The state already graduated them. And a family at a kitchen table in Wilmington will do this math every night until somebody in Washington is honest enough to do it too.