A growing number of conservatives want to harness the momentum around President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda to end the 44-year-old precedent guaranteeing undocumented children the right to an education.

Conservative lawmakers at the state and federal levels are voicing their concerns about the education of undocumented K-12 students as they try to cut back on the resources spent on undocumented immigrants and encourage stronger efforts to challenge the precedent.

“The taxpayers shouldn’t have to fund illegal alien children by federal mandate,” Rep. Chip Roy, a Texan running to become the state’s attorney general in November, told NOTUS. “If people want to be educated, then they can go home. Or we can certainly have some debate about what to do, but it’s a wrong opinion and we’re having to pay the bill.”

The Supreme Court ruled in 1982 in Plyler v. Doe that children could not be denied an education based on their immigration status. The majority of the justices agreed that having a generation of immigrant children, and later adults, who were uneducated would be a greater burden on the country than the price of having them in school.

Roy held a hearing in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government last month to revisit what he described as a harmful decision for schools and taxpayers. Roy referred to the court’s decision as “legislating from the bench” and said the issue should be left up to lawmakers.

Other Republican members of the committee agreed with Roy’s position that undocumented students should not be publicly educated at the expense of American taxpayers.

“That was the ruling back in ’82 but things have changed a little bit since then, haven’t they?” Rep. Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, asked a witness at the hearing, framing an increase in immigrants encountered at the border under President Joe Biden as part of the reason. “There’s certainly a cost associated with that.”

Despite the ideological support on the Hill, much of the battle to overturn Plyler is playing out at the state and local level. The Texas legislature tried to pass bills in 2024 and 2025 that would have prevented undocumented students from attending public schools, and Gov. Greg Abbott has repeatedly called for overturning Plyler.

The strongest outcry against Plyler in the state now comes from Roy, who told NOTUS he would “sue and fight for that down in Texas” if he’s elected attorney general.

Other states have attempted to challenge the 1982 Supreme Court decision as well. Tennessee has introduced multiple bills, including one that would charge undocumented students tuition and another that would require all schools in the state to verify the immigration status of every student.

In Oklahoma, the school board led by former state superintendent Ryan Walters approved a plan in 2025 that required proof of citizenship from families, though that stalled in the state legislature with little support.

The second Trump administration has escalated in its immigration enforcement tactics, including major operations in cities such as Portland, Los Angeles and Chicago. In its Minneapolis operation, the administration came under fire for its tactics toward children, such as establishing immigration enforcement operations near schools and the detainment of children including Liam Ramos.

While Trump has not been vocal about challenging Plyler, The New York Times reported that White House adviser Stephen Miller “raised the idea” to Texas state lawmakers of revoking public education funding for undocumented students.

“The characterization of Stephen pushing them is not accurate. They were providing a legislative update to [White House] staff and this issue came up over the course of their discussion,” a White House official told NOTUS in a statement. The official did not comment further on the idea of overturning Plyler.

Even in highly conservative states, however, not all Republicans are convinced that targeting children’s immigration status is the path forward in immigration enforcement. That’s made clear by Republicans’ inability to pass a law challenging Plyler so far at either the state or federal level.

There’s also broader public resistance to the idea of tying immigration enforcement to education. More than a third of parents say they’ve noticed an adverse effect on children from immigration enforcement in the second Trump administration, according to Stanford University’s Rapid Polling Project. These effects include fear and anxiety, family separation, declining school attendance and a reduced sense of safety.

“The idea that we should be telling teachers, and principals, and school administrators, guidance counselors that they need to be becoming immigration agents, and handing over lists of students, inviting [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] into classrooms — this is like an 80-20, 90-10 issue here,” Todd Schulte, president of the immigration advocacy organization FWD.us, told NOTUS about the lack of substantive support behind the bills challenging Plyler in different states. “Very conservative education leaders, people who disagree on a lot of things, realize how bad the educational outcomes would be here.”

Many of the bills at the state level are aimed at trying to calculate the cost of educating undocumented students. That’s information that the lawmakers behind them want collected, published and addressed by charging students tuition or denying enrollment altogether.

Because schools cannot currently ask about the immigration status of their students, many challenges to Plyler hinge around getting that information.

“Step one is data, and what are states paying for to educate and all the associated services that go with it in K-12 public education for illegal alien students,” said Lori Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Taxpayers “have a right to know how their money is being spent and on whom and for how much.”

Some studies show that immigrant families pay the local, state and federal taxes that fund public schools, and that by educating all students equally, there is a delayed, significant economic boost when those students reach adulthood.

According to the American Immigration Council, an immigration advocacy nonprofit, undocumented families paid more than $75 billion in taxes in 2022. FWD.us reports that since Plyler, people who were undocumented children have paid around $633 billion more in state and local taxes than what it cost to educate them. The education of undocumented students has benefits such as improving public health, decreasing childhood poverty and boosting the workforce and economy, FWD.us contends.

Whether efforts to overturn Plyler ever succeed, the attempts to do so cause fear and confusion, immigrant advocates say.

“The collective impact of all these anti-immigration narratives and efforts have been clear in immigrant communities – documented, undocumented, of all sorts – that have led to decreased enrollment. And so the real impact of that is that students are missing out on their civil right to an education,” Leslie Villegas, policy analyst for the liberal think tank New America, told NOTUS.

For now, organizations and legal experts are preparing themselves for more challenges to Plyler at the state and local level. If it is overturned, they say, it would have serious consequences for how the country perceives education policy as a whole.

“The Plyler court cites the Brown v. Board of Education decision, saying for the premise, specifically today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments,” Michael Pillera, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told NOTUS. “Brown said it’s doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he or she is denied an opportunity to education. That’s what’s at stake if this were successful.”