The Trump administration announced on Friday that it will not defend a decades-old federal grant program for colleges with high Hispanic enrollment, declaring that the funding is unconstitutional.
The Justice Department informed Congress that it agrees with a lawsuit seeking to strike down grants reserved for colleges and universities where at least 25% of undergraduates are Hispanic.
The program, created in 1998, was intended to address lower college enrollment and graduation rates among Latino students compared with their white peers.
Trump’s DOJ now argues that the grants provide an unconstitutional advantage based on race or ethnicity, citing a 2023 Supreme Court decision that ruled “outright racial balancing” is “patently unconstitutional.”
The challenge originates from the state of Tennessee and the conservative legal group Students for Fair Admissions, according to the New York Post.
The lawsuit claims that all public universities in Tennessee serve Hispanic students but fail to meet the program’s “arbitrary ethnic threshold,” excluding them from tens of millions of dollars in federal funding.
In a July 25 letter released Friday, Solicitor General John Sauer told House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) that the department “has decided not to defend” the program.
The move is in line with the administration’s