The Department of Justice declined to defend federal provisions that define Hispanic-serving institutions, concluding the provisions violate the equal-protection component of the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause. The HSI designation requires at least 25 percent of undergraduates to be Hispanic to qualify for grants. The decision cites Supreme Court precedent rejecting racial balancing and asserts the government lacks a legitimate interest in differentiating among universities by specified ethnic-seat counts. Federal law required DOJ officers to notify Congress of the decision. The determination could imperil roughly 600 HSIs and hundreds of millions in annual federal funding, and the Education Department acknowledged reporting that grants may be wound down.
The country's roughly 600 Hispanic-serving institutions are in peril of losing hundreds of millions of dollars annually from the federal government, after the Department of Justice said it won't defend the program against a lawsuit alleging the way HSIs are currently defined is unconstitutional. The suit challenges the requirement that a college or university's undergraduate population must be at least a quarter Hispanic to receive HSI funding.
Citing the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that banned affirmative action in student admissions, Sauer wrote that "the Supreme Court has explained that '[o]utright racial balancing' is 'patently unconstitutional'" and said "its precedents make clear that the government lacks any legitimate interest in differentiating among universities based on whether 'a specified number of seats in each class' are occupied by 'individuals from the preferred ethnic groups.'"
#hispanic-serving-institutions #department-of-justice #equal-protection-clause #higher-education-funding
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