Hispanic colleges targeted by lawsuit push back in court
This week, the association, better known as HACU, filed a motion to intervene in a federal lawsuit that seeks to dismantle the Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) program — which provides federal grants to universities and colleges with a student body that is over 25% Latino.
The program created by Congress provides grants to universities already educating the majority of the nation's Hispanic college students to expand their ability to help 'Hispanic students and other low-income individuals complete postsecondary degrees.'
HACU is now part of the effort started last month by the Students for Fair Admissions — the same group behind the legal challenges that resulted in the Supreme Court striking down college affirmative action programs in 2023 — and the state of Tennessee to sue the Department of Education over the HSI program. They allege it ' discriminates based on ethnicity ' and are calling on the federal court to deem it unconstitutional.
The association representing Hispanic universities also alleges that the lawsuit unfairly characterizes the HSI program, since the added resources from the grants benefit the entire student body of the institution.
"We want our side of the story to be heard by the court before they decide on the case," Dr. Antonio R. Flores, president and chief executive officer of HACU, told NBC News on Friday.
Flores said HSI-designated schools don't automatically get grants based on the number of Hispanic students on their campus. They must 'compete among themselves' to access the money and must prove that the majority of their students are low-income and that they 'spend less money per student than their peer institutions.'
"This is not about preferential treatment. It is about equitable resource allocation for institutions,' Flores said.
In court filings Thursday, Students for Fair Admissions and the state of Tennessee did not oppose HACU's motion to join the case as a defendant.
The Department of Education has not yet responded to the complaint in court. It also did not respond to an email from NBC News seeking comment on Friday.
To identify which colleges and universities serve the majority of the nation's Hispanic students, Congress defined Hispanic-Serving Institutions as those that have at least 25% of its full-time student population be of Hispanic or Latino descent.
The HSI designation is based on geography and demographics, Fran Fajana, an attorney at LatinoJustice representing HACU in this case, told NBC News. 'It's not because the institution went out of its way to recruit a lot of Latino students.'
The percentage of Latinos with a college degree still lags far behind white students. In 2022, about 21% of Latino adults over 25 had a bachelor's degree, compared to 42% for non-Hispanic whites, according to census figures.
Students for Fair Admissions, which is led by conservative activist Ed Blum, referred to the 25% requirement as an ' arbitrary ethnic threshold" when it published a news release about the lawsuit on June 11.
"This lawsuit challenges a federal policy that conditions the receipt of taxpayer-funded grants on the racial composition of a student body," Blum said in a statement last month.
The Office of Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said in another statement from that the "rule leaves many needy students out in the cold."
"The HSI program's discriminatory grant standards are just as illegal," Skrmetti said in the statement.
Their lawsuit is part of a series of legal challenges brought forward in recent years — following the Supreme Court's decision on affirmative action — against schools, scholarships, internships and other educational programs that mention race or ethnicity in their criteria.
Once an institution is competitively awarded a grant, there is no requirement in the HSI program limiting how those resources are distributed across the school, Fajana said.
"Whether they've gotten the resources to expand their science program laboratories [or]capacity building," she said, "those resources are not limited to Latino students."
A 2023 study from the Urban Institute found that the investments made by HSI-designated institutions increased the number of students of all races and ethnicities who completed college and obtained bachelor's degrees.
"What is at stake?" Flores said, "Success in advancement of, not just the Latino community, but all of the students who go to HSIs and benefit from the funding."
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Before the 2017 change, taxpayers, with a few exceptions, could deduct from their federal taxes the full amount they paid in local property taxes as well as either state income or sales taxes. Pritzker last week said the cap 'never should have been put in place in the first place.' Republicans who pushed for eliminating or at least limiting the deduction argued that the policy was a federal tax giveaway to Democratic-led states that had made political decisions to impose higher levies on their residents. Many Democrats in states such as New York, California and Illinois opposed the cap, arguing that their residents already send a greater share of tax dollars to Washington than their states receive back and that limiting the deduction would result in some people being taxed twice on the same income. The new cap became a contentious issue in some congressional races in the 2018 midterm election, particularly in suburban districts. U.S. Rep. Sean Casten of Downers Grove, for instance, campaigned heavily on the issue in his successful bid to unseat GOP Rep. Peter Roskam, a six-term incumbent from Wheaton who helped write the legislation creating the $10,000 cap. When Democrats took control of the House in 2019, they passed legislation that would have eliminated the cap. The measure was not taken up in the Republican-led Senate, though support for the limit didn't break cleanly along party lines. After Democrats took control of the Senate in 2021 with President Joe Biden in the White House, efforts to address the cap again faltered, despite efforts by Pritzker and other Democratic governors who wrote Biden a letter that spring calling for it to be eliminated. 'Like so many of President Trump's efforts, capping SALT deductions was based on politics, not logic or good government,' the letter said. 'This assault disproportionately targeted Democratic-run states, increasing taxes on hardworking families,' the governors said. Eventually, however, the issue was left by the wayside as the Biden administration worked to cobble together support for his scaled-down domestic policy agenda, in large part because eliminating the cap would have cost the federal government roughly $100 billion in lost revenue annually. Once Republicans took back control of Congress and the White House in the 2024 election, the GOP was forced to grapple with the issue as Trump and his supporters worked to push through his sweeping One Big Beautiful Bill Act. With few votes to spare thanks to a razor-thin majority and unified Democratic opposition to the overall package, several House Republicans from Democratic-led states, though none of Illinois' three GOP members, threatened to withhold their support if a higher limit for the state and local tax deduction wasn't included. Without any action from Congress, the cap would have expired completely at the end of the year. In the end, Trump signed a measure that raised the cap to $40,000 for the current year, with a 1% annual increase through 2029. In 2030, the cap will drop back to $10,000, unless Congress takes further action. The higher cap phases out for higher-income individuals, beginning with those earning more than $500,000 but doesn't drop below the $10,000 level for any taxpayer who claims the deduction. Despite the effort to scale back the cap for the highest earners, only about 7% of tax filers will see a benefit from the change, according to estimates from the Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, research associate Nikhita Airi said. Of the overall tax savings, nearly 85% will go to the top 20% of earners, with more than half going to those in the top 10%. 'It's a deduction with a pretty clear constituency, and that kind of explains why it's been so politically durable and what ended up happening within the reconciliation bill,' Airi said. Even though some Illinois Democrats have been pushing for the cap on the deduction to be raised, they weren't in a celebratory mood when Republicans did so as part of their massive $3.4 trillion package. 'If I served you a big bowl of poison and there's a Skittle in it, you shouldn't eat the Skittle,' Casten, the Downers Grove Democrat, said at a recent forum hosted by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.
