MAGA’s latest campaign of cruelty targets immigrant kids’ education

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........

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