The Heritage Foundation — the MAGA movement think tank behind the Trump administration’s destructive Project 2025 playbook — is pursuing another target in the regime’s brutal war on undocumented immigrants: schoolchildren.
Heritage is angling to get the Supreme Court to overturn Plyler v. Doe, a 44-year-old ruling that states cannot deny a free public education to children based on their immigration status. Plyler overturned a 1975 Texas law denying state funds for undocumented students and punishing school districts that enrolled them.
This civil rights ruling may not be as well-known as Brown v. Board of Education but its impact has been far-reaching.
Alejandra Vázquez Baur, a fellow at The Century Foundation, recently reviewed research documenting that “Plyler has advanced progress and equity, changing our schools — and our communities for the better.” Those benefits include massive economic benefits to state and local governments, with taxes paid by Plyler beneficiaries over their lifetimes far exceeding the costs of educating them.
“Plyler’s promise of education for all has overwhelmingly benefited American communities by cultivating immigrant children’s learning so that they can become thoughtful, responsible, contributing neighbors and citizens,” she wrote.
In contrast, locking undocumented kids out of classrooms would not only deny them their constitutional right to equal protection of the law, it would also be bad for the rest of us. Justices in the majority noted that denying children a basic education would make it hard for them to contribute to the country’s progress.
“It is difficult to identify many opinions in the Supreme Court’s entire history that have more profound consequences in more vital arenas, than Plyler v. Doe’s guarantee that the schoolhouse door cannot be closed to one of modern society’s most marginalized, most vilified groups,” according to Yale Law professor Justin Driver’s award-winning book, “The Schoolhouse Gate.”
But if Heritage gets its way, hundreds of thousands of kids could be forced out of school.
That sad prospect seems to excite the obsessively anti-immigrant White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who reportedly badgered Republican lawmakers from Texas about why a bill to stop state funds from being used to educate the children of undocumented immigrants had not passed. Miller made an anti-Plyler pitch during the first Trump administration.
In fact, right-wing efforts to get Plyler overturned go back 30 years. But Heritage seems to be intensifying its efforts to take advantage of the Supreme Court’s Trumpified majority.
In 2024, a Heritage fact sheet urged states to pass legislation that would give the Supreme Court a chance to “reconsider” Plyler. One of its authors was Lindsey Burke, then-director of education policy at Heritage and author of Project 2025’s chapter on education. Burke is now deputy chief of staff for policy and programs at the Department of Education.
Last month, the director of Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center weighed in and urged states to challenge Plyler. An Education Week analysis noted that the policy paper landed “as schools serving immigrant students are grappling with heightened immigration-enforcement activity that educators say disrupts learning and harms students’ emotional well-being.”
A few weeks later, a Fox News commentary by Heritage research fellow Corey DeAngelis called Plyler an “outlandish” ruling and claimed that overturning it is “the only way to fix education.”
DeAngelis both praised and criticized a bill by Tennessee Republicans requiring public schools to check and report on students’ immigration status, which one education advocate said will “inject fear into school communities and pull educators away from their central mission.”
But for DeAngelis, the version of the bill that passed the House “falls far short of what is truly needed.” The state Senate has passed a more aggressive version, which would allow K-12 schools to bar the door to undocumented students or charge them tuition. If either version becomes law, it could lead to a legal challenge to Plyler, which one Republican legislator called “a reason to vote for it.”
Tennessee Republicans are not alone in targeting the ruling. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has been talking about overturning Plyler for a few years now. Heritage says legislation challenging the ruling in some way was introduced in six states last year, though none became law, which might explain why Miller got cranky with those Texas legislators.
There are no good reasons — legal, educational, economic or moral — to overturn Plyler, victimize innocent kids and undermine their ability to make long-term contributions to their communities and our country.
We can hope that the Supreme Court might turn aside efforts to overturn this key civil rights ruling, but this court’s majority overturned Roe and is in the process of dismantling the Voting Rights Act, so vigilance is called for.
There’s also this historical footnote: After the Plyler ruling, two lawyers in the Reagan White House wrote a memo arguing that the administration should have taken a stronger stand in defense of the Texas law. One of those lawyers was a guy named John Roberts.
