Donors yank millions from Florida universities after ending in-state tuition for illegal immigrants

Two prominent Florida donors recently severed ties with Florida International University, Miami Dade College, and other institutions after the state stopped offering in-state tuition prices to illegal immigrants. 

However, legal and policy experts told The College Fix that honoring the donors’ wishes to restore the tuition discount could expose the institutions to legal ramifications. 

Over the summer, Miguel “Mike” Fernandez, a prominent South Florida philanthropist, withdrew $10 million from Miami Dade College and $1 million from Florida International University, saying the institutions should provide opportunities for all students, according to The Miami Herald.

“I cannot remain silent while thousands of Florida’s young residents are excluded from the opportunity to experience higher education,” Fernandez, an American citizen and immigrant from Cuba, wrote in a letter to Florida International, first published at The Miami Herald. 

Criticizing Republican lawmakers’ immigration policies, Fernandez wrote that his donation will remain suspended “until there is a reversal of the recent policy in Florida that has increased tuition for children of undocumented immigrants by over 250 percent.”

“I hope to see a commitment to equity and justice restored in Florida’s education policies,” the Vietnam veteran and healthcare entrepreneur wrote.

Months prior, TheDream.US, a private scholarship program for illegal immigrants co-founded by the Secretary of Commerce to President H.W. Bush Carlos Gutierrez, also cut scholarships to eight universities, including Florida International, affecting over 600 students, The Miami Herald reported in April.

The program said Florida’s decision to revoke in-state tuition for illegal immigrants ran “against the values” of its mission. 

Like Fernandez, TheDream also stated that it would withhold future donations if the schools continued denying in-state tuition to illegal immigrants. 

Neither Fernandez nor the scholarship fund replied to multiple emails and phone messages from The College Fix, asking about the situation. The media relations offices at Florida International and Miami Dade also did not respond.

However, Florida’s higher education institutions are unlikely to comply with the donor’s demands given the looming risk of government retaliation, according to legal and educational policy experts who spoke with The Fix. 

Hans von Spakovsky, a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told The Fix that if he were a university administrator, he “would not want to receive donations from anyone who wants the university to obstruct enforcement of federal law.” 

A former U.S. Department of Justice attorney, von Spakovsky said institutions that refuse to cooperate with the federal law risk losing “federal funds and grants.” 

In his email to The Fix, he said university officials who actively obstruct federal immigration enforcement are “subject to federal criminal prosecution.”

Recently, President Donald Trump began enforcing the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform Act, which prohibits public higher education institutions from offering in-state tuition prices to illegal immigrants while denying it to out-of-state citizens. 

In recent months, states including Texas and Oklahoma have complied with the law following federal pressure. Other states like Florida voluntarily repealed in-state tuition for illegal immigrants, while some states’ laws, including Minnesota, are currently being challenged in court by the Trump administration. 

Meanwhile, in order to comply with the federal law but still retain the enrollment of illegal immigrants, some blue states have begun offering financial incentives. 

Recently, Illinois passed a law to provide financial aid to college students who are not legal citizens, the Tampa Free Press reports.

As von Spakovsky told The Fix, Illinois is now acting in a “fundamentally unfair” way toward “citizen students, their families and the taxpayers who will be subsidizing illegal aliens.” 

“Illinois would rather punish out-of-state citizen students and its own taxpayers by continuing to charge them higher tuition rates than simply providing them with in-state tuition rates, too,” von Spakovsky said. 

Prior to Illinois’ passing the law, American Enterprise Institute’s Higher Education Fellow Preston Cooper warned in an email to The College Fix that the states and colleges working to circumvent federal enforcement of the law could struggle to avoid repercussions from the federal government.  

Cooper told The Fix via email that “public colleges in blue states might provide these students with extra financial aid to reduce their net tuition bill to what they would have paid under in-state tuition,” since these financial aid programs can “fly under the radar” as those budgets aren’t “as visible.”  

However, if detected by the federal government, Cooper said such entities could face “retaliation from the federal government for violating the spirit if not the letter of the law.”