Texas Governor Ready to Challenge Schooling of Migrant Children
Gov. Greg Abbott may target a 1982 Supreme Court ruling that requires schools to educate undocumented children. Some conservatives see an opening for a fresh look at old precedent.
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has taken a hard stance on immigration, using the issue to beat back challengers in the Republican primary.Credit...Brandon Bell/Getty Images
May 5, 2022
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HOUSTON — With the Supreme Court signaling a willingness to reverse decades-old precedents like the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said on Thursday that he would seek to overturn a 1982 court decision that obligated public schools to educate all children, including undocumented immigrants.
Mr. Abbott’s comments opened a new front in his campaign to use his powers as governor to harden Texas against unauthorized migration. And they demonstrated just how expansively some conservatives are thinking when it comes to the kinds of changes to American life that the court’s emboldened conservative majority may be willing to allow.
The latest proposal for closing public schools to undocumented children significantly widens the range of precedents up for debate. After a draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade leaked this week, focus had been primarily on other rights that could be legally linked to the 1973 decision, such as access to contraception and same-sex marriage.
Little has changed in the legal landscape surrounding the education of undocumented children since 1982, when the court issued a 5-to-4 decision to strike down a Texas law allowing schools to refuse admission to unauthorized migrant children, legal experts said. Several attempts over the years to chip away at the decision in the case known as Plyler v. Doe have been unsuccessful, including an effort by Alabama more than a decade ago and in California in the 1990s.
“If Abbott is serious about raising a challenge to it, this would be the first time that this has been done in many years,” said Preston Huennekens, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for limits on both legal and illegal immigration.
What has shifted is the composition of the court and, Mr. Abbott said, the number of new migrants arriving from a diverse range of countries, a situation that he said had placed an “extraordinary” burden on Texas schools. The migrants now arriving speak many different languages, “not just Spanish,” he said. The governor said educating undocumented children would soon become “unsustainable and unaffordable” if the federal government lifts its pandemic policy of turning back many migrants at the border, known as Title 42.
