In Georgia, undocumented students are barred from the state’s top public schools. Illustration by Oliver Munday

Melissa and Ashley, identical twins from Georgia, shared a bedroom while growing up. They had the same best friend, took classes together in high school, and dreamed of becoming artists in their own collective. “We’re like two different people with one brain,” Melissa liked to say.

In the spring of 2011, during their junior year, they decided to apply to college in their usual way—in tandem. The University of Georgia, in Athens, the state’s flagship university, was their first choice. “All my life, I knew I wanted to go to college, even before I understood what that would entail,” Ashley said. “My parents didn’t go to college, so they didn’t know how to navigate all this. We had to figure out the process for ourselves.” As soon as they started filling out the application online, however, they encountered a problem. The second page of the Web site wouldn’t load.

Ashley called the university’s admissions office to see if the site had crashed. The receptionist, who spoke in a treacly drawl, directed her to a question on the first page, which asked if the applicant was a United States citizen.

“It should say ‘yes’—is that what you put?” she asked.

“We’re sort of in limbo at the moment,” Ashley replied. When the twins were six years old, they moved from Mexico with their parents and older sister to the suburbs of Atlanta. Victor and Verónica, their father and mother, came to Georgia legally to work in the construction boom of the mid-nineties. In 2010, they applied for permanent residency, but a year later they still hadn’t received a response.

“I don’t know what to tell you, sweetie,” the receptionist said. “It probably has to do with that.”

Ashley and Melissa didn’t know it, but the year before, the Georgia Board of Regents, which oversees the university system, had instituted a policy barring undocumented students from the state’s top five public schools. Georgia had thirty-five public colleges, serving about three hundred and ten thousand students, of whom some five hundred were undocumented; only twenty-nine undocumented students were enrolled at the top five schools. Nevertheless, the state legislature wanted the Board of Regents to send a message. As a state senator’s spokesman said, “We can’t afford to have illegal immigrants taking a taxpayer-subsidized spot in our colleges.” Two other states—South Carolina and Alabama—ban undocumented students from public universities.

Each year, about three thousand undocumented students graduate from high school in Georgia, but their opportunities for college are severely limited. At the public universities they’re still allowed to attend, they must pay out-of-state tuition, more than double what state residents pay. To matriculate at private colleges, they have to apply as international students, and often that doesn’t allow them to qualify for the financial aid they may need. Many of them have given up on applying altogether.

“I always just lived my life normally, until I tried to do stuff and couldn’t,” Melissa told me. She and Ashley are short, with round faces and dark eyes, and have a laid-back manner that often tips into reserve, except when they talk about their situation, which they do in chatty, almost lighthearted tones. The college application was like the driver’s license they couldn’t get, or the work permit for which they didn’t qualify. The twins were used to improvising, and they decided to delay applying until their legal status was clarified.

On a winter day midway through the girls’ senior year, their parents received a letter from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, telling them, without explanation, that their residency application had been denied. In the next several hours, huddled in the living room, the family made a plan. Melissa and Ashley would graduate from high school; then the family would decide whether to stay in the country illegally or leave for Mexico.

An order of deportation came in the mail a few weeks later. In an apparent error, it was addressed only to their older sister, Melanie. The letter told her to leave the U.S. by June 15, 2012. Unsure what to do, the family waited, hoping that Melanie had been singled out by mistake. Then, on the day she was supposed to leave, President Obama announced that he was issuing an executive order called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which suspended the deportations of young people who had come to the U.S. as children. Melissa, Ashley, and Melanie would be allowed to stay, for the time being, but their parents’ position had not changed.

Around that time, Verónica saw a post on a friend’s Facebook page that mentioned Freedom University, in Athens, minutes away from the University of Georgia. It was a school for undocumented students who had been shut out of the public universities, offering free college-level instruction once a week. The school’s exact location was secret, because Ku Klux Klansmen had threatened to break up classes and alert immigration authorities. The school’s scrappy unconventionality attracted Ashley and Melissa; their friends were preparing for college, and the twins were restless to get on with their own educations. They filled out applications on the school’s Web site and submitted short personal statements about why they wanted to attend. Soon afterward, they were accepted, and received e-mails with the address and their class schedules. One Sunday morning in August, Verónica drove Melissa and Ashley an hour east for their first day at Freedom University. In the car, they chatted nervously about what awaited them. “Who gets undocumented students all together?” Melissa remembered thinking. “This almost sounds like a setup.”

The University of Georgia, in Athens, did not accept black students until 1961. The following year, in an effort to maintain segregation, the state spent four hundred and fifty thousand dollars on grants and scholarships to send black students from Georgia to institutions in other states. Among the last schools to desegregate were the five universities that now barred undocumented students. “I see history repeating itself here,” Erroll Davis, a former chancellor of the state university system and superintendent of Atlanta’s public schools, told the local press. Davis had implemented the 2010 ban, but he said that he had little choice in the matter. Republican state legislators had threatened to pass an even harsher measure if the board failed to act. Referring to his former students in the public schools, Davis said to me, “All told, you spend over a hundred thousand dollars on them, and then you tell them they can’t go to college in Georgia?”