Legislation sponsored by Sen. Jennifer Boysko, died in committee in late January, and the legislator said she will try again next year. And a bill sponsored by Del. Alfonso Lopez, never made it out of a house appropriations subcommittee around the same time.
Dr. Scott Ralls
Some administrators at public colleges in Virginia have supported the initiatives to make higher education affordable to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival recipients, also known as “Dreamers,” who almost exclusively are lower-income and first-generation Latino students.
“We have noted on the record in the past that we support this type of legislation because we are a college that has a significant number of students who could be impacted by it,” said Dr. Scott Ralls, president of Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA).
Ralls said that NOVA’s board has supported such legislation as far back as 2013. It would significantly lower tuition costs for participants in DACA, a program that President Obama created by executive order in 2012 to protect from deportation children of illegal immigrants. The Trump administration has tried unsuccessfully to end the program, saying it is unconstitutional for immigration law to be created by the executive branch rather than the legislative.
DACA recipients, ineligible for federal financial aid to help pay for school, are in limbo as neither the U.S. House nor the Senate currently has proposed legislation to resolve the issue. The issue was at the center of the recent partial shutdown of the federal government, the longest in U.S. history, as President Trump sought to tie DACA benefits with funding for a wall system on the nation’s southern border.
