US District Judge Stephen McGlynn Ruled the RISE Act, the DREAM Act and Illinois’s In-State Tuition Policy Unconstitutional Under the Supremacy Clause — Handing the Trump Administration a Major Win in Its Nationwide Campaign Against State-Level Sanctuary Policies, While Giving Illinois 14 Days to Appeal
What the Court Decided
On 25 July 2026, US District Judge Stephen McGlynn of the Southern District of Illinois issued a ruling that permanently bars Illinois from enforcing a cluster of state laws providing in-state college tuition, state financial aid and scholarship access to undocumented immigrants. The decision, which grants the federal government’s motion for summary judgment and denies Illinois’s motion to dismiss, strikes down three specific pieces of Illinois legislation as unconstitutional and invalid under the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution as applied to people not lawfully present in the country.
The laws struck down are Illinois’s in-state tuition policy itself, the Retention of Illinois Students and Equity Act — known as the RISE Act — which gives qualifying undocumented college students access to state-funded financial aid, and the Illinois DREAM Act, which established scholarship opportunities for eligible undocumented students administered through the state-created Illinois DREAM Fund Commission. The ruling does not take effect immediately. Judge McGlynn stayed the order for 14 days specifically to give Illinois the opportunity to seek emergency intervention from a federal appeals court before the consequences of the ruling take practical effect.
Spokespeople for Governor JB Pritzker and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul did not immediately respond to press requests for comment on the ruling or on whether the state intends to appeal.
The Constitutional Argument at the Centre of the Case
The legal theory the Department of Justice advanced — and that Judge McGlynn has now accepted — is rooted in the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution, which establishes that federal law is the supreme law of the land and that conflicting state law must give way to it. The specific federal statute at the heart of the case is 8 US Code Section 1623, a provision of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. That statute states that states may not provide undocumented immigrants with postsecondary education benefits based on residency unless the same benefits are simultaneously made available on the same terms to all US citizens, regardless of which state they live in.
The DOJ’s argument, accepted by the court, is that Illinois’s in-state tuition policy, the RISE Act and the DREAM Act all do exactly what Section 1623 prohibits. By offering in-state tuition rates and state financial aid to undocumented students who attended Illinois high schools and lived in Illinois, Illinois was providing residency-based educational benefits to people not lawfully present in the country — without simultaneously offering those same benefits to all US citizens living in other states. A US citizen from Iowa or Wisconsin who wanted to attend the University of Illinois was charged out-of-state tuition. An undocumented student who attended an Illinois high school was charged in-state rates. That differential, the court found, is precisely what federal law forbids.
US Attorney Steven Weinhoeft, whose office in the Southern District of Illinois brought the case together with the DOJ’s Civil Division, framed the ruling in sharp and politically pointed language: “Illinois sought to incentivize illegal immigration on the taxpayer’s dime by treating illegal aliens better than US citizens living in other states, in clear violation of federal law. This ruling enforces the statute Congress wrote and stops the State from putting illegal aliens ahead of American citizens.”
The History of the Laws Being Struck Down
Both the Illinois DREAM Act and the in-state tuition policy it struck down have history that predates the current political moment by more than a decade. The Illinois DREAM Act was enacted in 2011 under Democratic Governor Pat Quinn, establishing the Illinois DREAM Fund Commission as a privately funded scholarship programme administered by the state. Illinois’s in-state tuition policy for qualifying undocumented students, similar in structure to those enacted by a number of other states, was similarly longstanding.
The RISE Act — the Retention of Illinois Students and Equity Act — represents a more recent and more politically charged expansion of those benefits. It broadened access to state financial aid for undocumented students, requiring that a qualifying student have graduated from an Illinois high school, attended an in-state school for at least three years, and pledged to file an application to become a permanent US resident as soon as they became eligible. Governor Pritzker expanded the RISE Act’s scope in 2025 to make undocumented students eligible for even more state and local financial assistance beginning January 1, 2026.
The lawsuit challenging all three was filed by the DOJ in September 2025, naming Governor Pritzker, Attorney General Raoul and officials from several state colleges among the defendants, including Southern Illinois University, Rend Lake College, the University of Illinois, Chicago State University and Eastern Illinois University.
Where This Fits Within the Trump Administration’s Broader Campaign
Friday’s ruling is not an isolated legal event — it is one front in a coordinated and nationally significant campaign by the Trump administration’s DOJ to use federal courts to dismantle state-level immigration policies that the administration characterises as in conflict with federal immigration law. The Southern District of Illinois case against Governor Pritzker runs in parallel with a separate DOJ lawsuit against the state of Colorado over substantially similar in-state tuition and financial aid policies for undocumented immigrants — suggesting that the administration has identified the specific legal theory that prevailed in Illinois as a template for challenging comparable policies in other Democratic-governed states across the country.
The ruling follows the logic of a broader strategy the administration has been executing since early 2025: rather than seeking immediate, sweeping legislative changes to immigration law through a Congress that has repeatedly deadlocked on the issue, the DOJ has pursued a state-by-state litigation strategy using existing federal statutes — including Section 1623, the provision at the centre of Friday’s ruling — to challenge specific state policies that it argues conflict with federal law. The administration has pursued similar strategies in relation to sanctuary city policies, state restrictions on cooperation with ICE enforcement activities, and other areas where blue-state governments have sought to limit the practical effect of federal immigration enforcement within their borders.
Who the Ruling Affects
The practical effect of the ruling, if it survives the 14-day stay and any subsequent appeal, falls directly on the undocumented students who are currently enrolled in Illinois colleges and universities relying on state financial aid under the RISE Act, or who are scholarship recipients under the Illinois DREAM Act. These are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, young people who were brought to the United States as children, attended Illinois public schools, graduated from Illinois high schools, and built their entire educational trajectory around access to the in-state tuition rates and financial aid that Illinois law has made available to them for more than a decade. The ruling does not address their immigration status, which remains a separate and unaffected question, but it does eliminate the financial architecture that has allowed many of them to afford Illinois’s public universities in the first place.
The named defendants in the lawsuit — the University of Illinois, Chicago State University, Eastern Illinois University, Southern Illinois University and Rend Lake College — will need to assess what compliance with the ruling requires at each institution if the 14-day stay expires without appellate intervention.
The 14-Day Window and What Illinois Will Almost Certainly Do
The 14-day stay McGlynn attached to his ruling is a standard judicial mechanism in cases where an immediate enforcement of a sweeping injunction would produce irreversible practical consequences before an appeal can be heard. Given the political and policy stakes involved — and given that this ruling eliminates educational benefit programmes that have been in place for more than a decade and that currently serve a substantial number of enrolled students — it would be virtually unprecedented for the Pritzker administration not to seek an emergency stay from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals within that 14-day window.
The Seventh Circuit, which covers Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, will then need to decide whether to maintain the programmes in place pending appeal — a decision that turns on the standard factors courts apply when considering emergency stays: the likelihood that the appellant will succeed on the merits of the appeal, the irreparable harm that would result if the stay is denied, the balance of hardships between the parties, and the public interest. None of those factors is obviously one-sided in a case of this legal and factual complexity, which means the immediate future of these programmes is genuinely uncertain rather than predetermined in either direction.
The Wider Constitutional Debate
Beyond the immediate legal mechanics, Friday’s ruling raises a question with implications for every state that has enacted similar policies: is Section 1623 of the 1996 immigration act as sweeping and as categorical in its prohibition as Judge McGlynn’s ruling treats it? Some legal scholars have argued that states retain meaningful authority to define residency-based benefits in ways that do not run afoul of Section 1623, provided the specific structure of their programmes does not constitute the kind of discrimination the statute was designed to prohibit. Others have argued that the statute is unambiguous and that every in-state tuition policy for undocumented students in the country — at least 20 states have enacted such policies at various times — is vulnerable on the same grounds.
What happens in the Seventh Circuit will be watched closely by those 20 or so states, by the DOJ and its parallel Colorado litigation, and by the hundreds of thousands of undocumented students across the country whose educational access depends, in whole or in part, on state-level policies that the Trump administration’s DOJ is now treating as constitutionally defective on a nationwide basis.
Sources
- Fox News — Court checks Pritzker as Trump administration scores another immigration win (July 25, 2026) — foxnews.com
- Fox 32 Chicago — Illinois giving undocumented immigrants in-state tuition rate is unconstitutional, judge says (July 25, 2026) — fox32chicago.com
- Washington Examiner — Federal judge blocks Illinois laws giving illegal immigrants in-state tuition (July 25, 2026) — washingtonexaminer.com
- Fox Wilmington / WSFX-TV — Court checks Pritzker as Trump administration scores another immigration win (July 25, 2026) — foxwilmington.com
- Tristate Homepage — Judge blocks Illinois from offering in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants (July 25, 2026) — tristatehomepage.com
- RedState — Federal Judge Strikes Down Illinois Laws That Gave Illegals In-State Tuition, Financial Aid (July 25, 2026) — redstate.com
- Gateway Pundit — HUGE WIN FOR AMERICANS: Federal Judge Strikes Down Illinois Laws Giving Illegal Aliens In-State Tuition, Financial Aid, and Scholarships (July 25, 2026) — thegatewaypundit.com