Tennessee Wants to Let Schools Ban Immigrant Kids, Threatening to “End Public Education as We Know It”

Tennessee Republicans are pushing forward with a bill that could force undocumented children out of public education and turn school administrators into immigration informants against their own students, making Tennessee the frontier of an effort led by the Heritage Foundation to fundamentally injure the right to public education.

The state’s proposed “trigger laws,” which will be heard in committee on Wednesday, are direct challenges to Plyler v. Doe, a narrowly decided 1982 Supreme Court case that enshrined the right to a free K–12 public education regardless of immigration status. The parallel bills would also likely violate federal statutes that codify the same right.

The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, has officially called on other states to pass similar laws challenging Plyler, situating Tennessee’s push as among the first in a broader national effort to overturn the decision.

“Illegal aliens should not be eligible for federal, state, or local government benefits, including through their children,” wrote Lora Ries, the director of Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center, in a February 17 post, “because the receipt of such benefits facilitates longer unlawful residence in the United States and takes resources from American citizens and lawful immigrants.”

So far, six states — Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho, Indiana, New Jersey, and Tennessee — have introduced bills that would violate Plyler. If passed, their implementation could force a challenge at the Supreme Court.

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Last year, the Tennessee state legislature introduced a bill, H.B. 793, that would allow schools to refuse to enroll students who cannot prove “lawful presence” in the United States or charge them tuition, but it was tabled due to concerns about potential federal funding losses because the law violated federal statutes. The bill would also require schools to report the number of students who enroll without a birth certificate. The Tennessee Senate version would allow schools to choose to deny enrollment to undocumented students only if they are unable to pay.

Now, the bill is back — and scheduled for a state House Finance, Ways, and Means Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday. A companion bill, which would require schools and other entities that receive state funding, like hospitals, to report to the government on recipients’ immigration status, moved out of committee last week. The second bill is also scheduled to be heard by the House State & Local Government Committee on Wednesday. It can only be enacted if H.B. 793 passes and Plyler is overturned.

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The Texas state legislature previously introduced two bills challenging Plyler. The first bill would allow public schools to charge undocumented children to attend, and the latter bill would require proof of citizenship to enroll in public school. Both of those bills have stalled, but Krystal Gómez, managing attorney for the Texas Immigration Law Council, said she expects more challenges to Plyler in the next legislative session.

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In Texas, immigrant student attendance has already declined dramatically since the start of Trump’s immigration enforcement ramp-up. The Houston school district lost nearly 4,000 immigrant students this year, a decline of roughly 22 percent of the school district’s immigrant population. It’s unclear how many of those students left the United States willingly, or were deported, and how many children still living in Houston are simply too afraid to return to classrooms.

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Schools would have to acquire “new software, new computers, new administrative processes and staff” to track and determine the immigration status of the tens of thousands of children within any given school district, not just students who are undocumented, she said.

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