Undocumented ASU Students March for In-State Tuition

Shouting “undocumented and unafraid”, Arizona State University’s undocumented students and their allies marched across ASU’s Tempe campus Thursday evening. The students were calling on the Arizona Attorney General’s Office to abandon their lawsuit against the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) and grant DACA students in-state tuition.

“Attorney General Mark Brnovich is blaming DACA students, scapegoating them, saying that we are the reason tuition is higher for other students,” Korina Iribe, advocacy director of ASU’s Undocumented Students for Education Equity, said. “Today we are here to send a clear message, we are all Sun Devils.”

Undocumented Students for Education Equity is an ASU student organization that launched in April of this year. Their mission is to “advocate, educate, and build communities” for DACA recipient students at ASU, according to USEE’s Communications Coordinator Edder Diaz Martinez.

The march started on University Bridge and ended on Hayden Lawn, where several members of USEE gave speeches, stressing the importance of allowing undocumented students in-state tuition.

Estefania Gomez Ruiz, an undocumented student attending ASU, described a time in her life where achieving a college degree didn’t seem financially possible.

“When I was in high school, I remember learning about the resources I wasn’t eligible for,” Ruiz said. “I remember learning about federal financial aid, loans and pell grants. Most scholarship applications required a social security number.”

Without in-state tuition through the DACA program, obtaining a higher education would be impossible, Ruiz said.

“ABOR is being sued over granting in-state tuition to undocumented students and I am tired of the constant attacks that undocumented students have to endure,” Ruiz said.

“Punishing DACA students by forcing them to pay out-of-state tuition is yet another attack on DACA students by politicians like AG Brnovich,” Iribe said in a media release. “This is clearly an attack on DACA students to appease his anti-immigrant voter-base. We are tired of being political pawns in a game for political points.”

The Arizona Attorney General’s Office Director of Communications Ryan Anderson said USEE’s protests should be directed at ABOR for being unable to legally fulfill their promise of in-state tuition for DACA students.

“They [ABOR] could have solved this conundrum for the students right now. They chose not to,” Anderson said in an email. “They broke the law in the first place, they've set expectations for DACA students by providing a lower tuition rate, and now ABOR has left them hanging out in legal and financial limbo.”

But USEE isn’t unhappy with ABOR, Martinez said. ABOR was following the lead of Maricopa Community Colleges by providing in-state tuition on the basis, with support from “legal scholars and legal professors”, that DACA students have legal presence in the United States.

“By them pushing it on ABOR,” Martinez said, “figuratively they wipe their hands clean of their actions.”

The Arizona Attorney General’s Office said USEE would do better by asking ABOR to follow through on their promise of in-state tuition by finding the financial means “via private donations and private funds such as the ASU Foundation”.

According to Iribe, “The permanent solution to this issue is the clean DREAM Act. A clean DREAM Act without further criminalizing immigrant families is the real solution to solve this issue.”