Plyler v. Doe: The Tyler School Case That Reached the Supreme Court

In the nineteen seventy-seven school year, the Tyler Independent School District began charging undocumented immigrant children one thousand dollars per year in tuition to attend public school. The policy followed a Texas statute that withheld state funding for the education of children who were not legally admitted residents of the United States. For families already living with limited resources and uncertain legal status, the fee was a wall.

Attorneys from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, MALDEF, found their clients in Tyler itself. They represented families where brothers and sisters in the same household held different legal statuses: some born in Mexico, others born in Texas and therefore American citizens. On September sixth, nineteen seventy-seven, MALDEF filed a class action lawsuit.

The case worked through federal courts and eventually reached the United States Supreme Court under the name Plyler v. Doe. On June fifteenth, nineteen eighty-two, the Court ruled five to four that the Texas policy violated the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause.

Writing for the majority, Justice William Brennan held that undocumented children are persons within the meaning of the Constitution, and that a state cannot impose on them the lifetime hardship of illiteracy and social disadvantage as a consequence of their parents' immigration choices, choices the children themselves never made. The ruling established that every child in the United States, regardless of immigration status, has the legal right to a free public K-through-twelve education. It remains one of the most significant education law decisions in American constitutional history.

And it began in Tyler, Texas, in a dispute over one thousand dollars and a school year.