Undocumented children poured into the nation’s schools over the next generation, and as they reached college age, they coalesced into a movement, advocating access to higher education as well as full citizenship. In 2001, they began calling themselves Dreamers, now an estimated 2.1 million young immigrants who have grown up as Americans in almost every way except for their passports. The name came from the Dream Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors), introduced in Congress in 2001 by Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, and Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, and for which activists fought for over a decade. The measure, which would have put undocumented children on a path to citizenship, never passed, but the vast network of Dreamers became a compelling political force.

In 2001, hundreds of them turned out to testify in Texas in favor of legislation to allow undocumented residents to pay in-state college tuition if they graduated from Texas high schools and lived in the state for three years. “Something magical happened when those kids told their stories,” says the former Texas state representative Rick Noriega, a Democrat who sponsored the bill. “It was a humanizing of a very real issue dealing with children’s dreams and hopes. Every heart on that committee was touched, Republicans and Democrats.” The legislation passed both houses almost unanimously and was signed by Rick Perry, then governor of Texas and now President Donald Trump’s pick for energy secretary. Texas became the first state, followed quickly by California, to allow Dreamers to pay in-state tuition. Today, 21 states charge Dreamers the same tuition as legal residents, including six carried by Trump — Florida, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah and Texas.

In many of those states, however, the once-bipartisan issue has turned politically treacherous. In Texas, efforts to repeal the tuition law come closer to passing every year, and Noriega says there is no chance the original measure would pass today. The leading national opponents of in-state tuition for Dreamers include the Republican senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s choice for attorney general, and the secretary of state of Kansas, Kris Kobach, a Republican who was a leader of Trump’s transition team on immigration. Each argues that students who are in the United States illegally should not get a public benefit in any state that is denied to a citizen from another state. In other words, if Dreamers pay in-state tuition in Texas, citizen students next door in Arkansas and Oklahoma — or Massachusetts, for that matter — should have the same right. “How much sense does that make, to have people here illegally, and they have more benefits than those who are here legally?” Sessions asked in a Senate floor statement. Kobach used the same argument to bring class-action lawsuits against in-state tuition for Dreamers in Kansas and California. Judges found no legal basis for the claims and dismissed the cases.

The larger debate over how to treat an estimated 11 million immigrants who came here illegally has been at a stalemate for decades, with advocates seeking a “path to citizenship” for law-abiding families who have been in the country for years and opponents denouncing “amnesty” for people who broke the law to enter the country. Amid hardening resistance in Congress to immigration reform, Dreamers brought pressure on Obama — including sit-ins and hunger strikes at his 2012 campaign offices — to use his executive power to create DACA. The program, announced on June 15, 2012, the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Plyler decision, proved transformative for Dreamers. They have entered college, taken on-the-books jobs, received driver’s licenses, bought cars. They now fly on planes, passing effortlessly through airport security. They still lack legal immigration status, but no longer are they exactly undocumented. “DACAmented,” many have called themselves.

Image Indira doing homework as a second grader. Credit... Photograph from Indira Islas

Even in states where they pay in-state tuition, Dreamers still struggle to afford college because they are disproportionately low-income and have no access to federal financial aid. Fewer than 10 percent of Dreamers who graduate from high school enroll in college. At a time when college graduates earn 70 percent more than those without degrees, these numbers conjure the 1982 warning by the Supreme Court that undocumented children could become a permanent underclass.

In response, a handful of philanthropies have adopted the cause of sending students with DACA status to college. The biggest of these, TheDream.US, has raised $90 million to eventually finance 4,000 students at public colleges, with significant contributions from Donald Graham, former publisher and chief executive of The Washington Post, and his family; Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan; Bill and Melinda Gates; the hedge-fund executive William Ackman; and Michael Bloomberg, among others. (I was a reporter at The Washington Post from 1980 to 2008.) In 2014, TheDream.US began offering Dreamers full scholarships in states that charge them in-state tuition. Last year, in partnership with Delaware and Connecticut, the organization created the opportunity-scholarship program for students from the other 29 states, financed by $41 million in philanthropy from Graham and his family and two anonymous donors. The governors of Delaware and Connecticut agreed to charge roughly in-state tuition rates for the 34 scholars at Delaware State and the 42 at Eastern Connecticut State — a total of $80,000 per student for tuition, room and board for four years. In an effort to pre-empt political opposition, Graham says, the philanthropy works only with schools, like Delaware State and Eastern Connecticut State, that have excess capacity, so that undocumented students are not displacing citizens. And private donors pay all expenses, so that no state dollars are spent.