United States v. Oklahoma

What’s at stake: Whether undocumented immigrants who graduate from Oklahoma high schools have access to the same affordable college education as their classmates.

Summary: Like over two dozen other state laws, Oklahoma law has long allowed undocumented immigrants who graduate local high schools to attend public college at the same in-state tuition rates as their peers. The law, passed over twenty years ago, was designed to comply with two federal laws that restrict how states may offer benefits to undocumented immigrants. For decades, thousands of students have relied on those state laws to access an affordable college education.

In 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice decided that these tuition equity laws violate the two federal laws they were designed to satisfy. Rather than seek to repeal Oklahoma’s law through the democratic process, the government “partnered” with the Oklahoma Attorney General to invalidate it in court. On August 5, 2025, they asked a federal court to enter a “consent decree” striking down the law. Because the Oklahoma Attorney General is responsible for defending state laws, his decision to take the federal government’s side against the law left no one to defend the law.

Just two days after the government filed the lawsuit, a federal magistrate judge recommended that the court grant the motion for a consent decree. The magistrate shortened the normal two-week deadline for objections to three days.

Four days later, Public Justice filed an amicus brief to oppose the suit. Not only was the tuition equity law valid, we argued, but the governments’ joint effort to erase it raised a more fundamental problem: Under the Constitution, two co-parties may not use a collusive lawsuit to invalidate a democratically enacted law, especially when they do not give the affected people any chance to defend it.

On August 29, 2025, the district court ruled that Public Justice’s amicus brief was “untimely” because it was filed three days after the magistrate issued his recommendation. The court entered the proposed consent decree without considering the brief.

Core legal problem: To keep federal courts within their proper role in our democratic system, and to make sure they hear both sides of the important issues they decide, the Constitution limits their jurisdiction to “cases” and “controversies”—that is, real live disputes between “adverse” litigants. A court may not strike down a democratically enacted law based only on a one-sided request by two parties who both want the same thing. Collusive suits like this one violate that principle and undermine our democracy.

Public Justice co-counseled with attorney Nathan Ritcher on the brief.