Mother’s Legal Status Used To Deny Financial Aid

A New Jersey high school student finds herself in the unlikely position of suing the government for an opportunity to go to college. According to a report in the Huffington Post the young Latina student is a US born citizen who applied for college financial aid and was denied solely on the grounds that her mother is not a US citizen.

These are the particulars of the case:

• the student wishes to remain anonymous; she’s being identified only as A.Z.
• she was born in the US
• she’s a hared working, high achieving student who wants to go to college
• she applied to the state run Higher Education Student Assistance Authority (HESAA) for financial aid
• she was rejected becasue her parents are not legal US residents

The HESSA is resting on a technicality.

HESAA representative Marnie Grodman, the acting director of legal matters for the agency, said…the agency requires students – or if they are not yet legally adults, their parents – to prove they have been domiciled in New Jersey for a period of at least a year immediately before the academic period for which they are requesting aid.

The sticking point here is the word “domiciled.”

The New Jersey state agency says that the undocumented cannot be “domiciled,” that in order to be “domiciled” a person must be a US citizen. The ACLU and a Rutgers University legal clinic have taken up the case.

Ronald K. Chen of the Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic said immigration and legal advocacy groups have seen an uptick in New Jersey of students who are U.S. citizens born to illegal immigrants getting rejected for tuition aid.
“As far as we can tell, it’s not an isolated incident or a bureaucratic mistake; it’s clearly a policy decision HESAA has decided to take,” Chen said. “We respectfully think it’s not lawful to discriminate against a U.S. citizen because of their parent’s status.”

The ACLU has filed a suit with the Appellate Division of New Jersey Superior Court, arguing that the  denial of financial aid violates equal protection laws. Also, the legislation that created the program does not list the residency status of a parent as a prerequisite for an aid award.

The denial seems to be an off-shoot of a debate that questions whether undocumented students should pay out of  state tuition or in state tuition.

But the student in question in this case is a U.S. citizen, so that argument does not apply. And this is where the denial runs afoul of the law.

Even if the HESAA application were to demand the immigration status of the parents as a prerequisite, policy counsel for the ACLU’s New Jersey chapter, Alexander) Shalom said, it would be superseded by federal and state constitutions that forbid discrimination against U.S. citizens because of a parent’s status.

A date for the case before the New Jersey appellate court has yet to be determined.

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