Plyer v. Doe: Public Education for Undocumented Children

The Texas Observer has a detailed story by Barbara Belajack on the case of Plyer v. Doe, offering a concise survey of the history of the litigation and the players involved (from Laura Alverez — an undocumented child involved as a plaintiff, to Chief Justice John Roberts, then a lawyer at DOJ whose old memo shows his dissatisfaction with the decision). The article also traces out some of the post-Plyer developments concerning the education of the undocumented.  U.S. District Judge Justice’s 1978 description of the reasons for the Texas policy has resonance today in the face of local ordinances aimed at the undocumented, who have become scapegoats for complex social and fiscal problems:

[Judge]Justice chided the state for using the children to deal, in a backhanded way, with longstanding problems caused by a school finance system based on property taxes. No one disputed that school districts were overburdened and that there were many poor, Spanish-speaking, immigrant students, particularly along the border, he wrote. But testimony indicated that most of them were legal immigrant children. “Bent on cutting educational costs and unable constitutionally to exclude all such ‘problem’ children, the state has attempted to shave off a little around the edges, barring the undocumented alien children,” he wrote. “The expedience of this state’s policy may have been influenced by two actualities: children of illegal aliens had never been explicitly afforded any judicial protection, and little political uproar was likely to be raised in their behalf.”

The link to the full story is here.  Thanks to Cappy White for sending it my way.

-jmc