On an organized conference call focusing on the impacts of state and federal legislation on the Hispanic community, several Planned Parenthood clinic directors and advocates for Hispanic women described how the Latina population — because of its size, income and health status — would be disproportionately affected by proposed federal and state funding cuts to family planning services.

Patricio Gonzalez, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Association of Hidalgo County, said the average patient who accesses his Planned Parenthood clinics in Hidalgo and Starr Counties is between the ages of 20 to 25, has at least two kids (and no desire for a third) and is trying to put herself through school; she also has no health insurance. Gonzalez said approximately 23,000 people use services at his Planned Parenthood affiliate; of those, 20 percent do not have a Social Security number, but they are still able to access services through the state’s Title XX Social Services Block Grant, which is threatened by the budget cuts.

He said he predicts that without access to affordable pregnancy preventative measures, there will be an increase in pregnancy rates among illegal immigrant women in Texas, as well as an increase in women crossing the border into Mexico to obtain abortion-inducing drugs. The proposed funding cuts, he said, would reduce the amount of services his clinics would be able to provide by approximately 60 percent, and the majority of them would likely have to close down.

Gonzalez said that two years ago, two community health care workers at one of his clinics went into Mexico and posed as “mystery shoppers” at local pharmacies to find out how easy it would be to obtain abortion-inducing drugs.

Dora Alicia Proa, 57, was one of the promotoras de salud (community health care worker) who participated in the experiment.

In a call that was translated by an interpreter, Proa told TAI that she was able to obtain pills without a prescription from 10 different pharmacies she visited in Tamaulipas, Mexico, which borders Progreso, Texas. The way it works, she said, is a woman goes into a pharmacy and tells the pharmacist she has not gotten her period. Then the pharmacist sells her pills at a low cost (she couldn’t remember the exact price) and tells her if they do not work, she can return for stronger pills. Women can also obtain hormonal birth control injections at a cheap cost, she said.

The last time she crossed the border on one of these mystery shopping sprees, Proa said the streets were deserted due to increased violence — a drastic change from the previous year, when she said pharmacies were clamoring with women trying to buy abortion drugs.

Proa said she thinks cuts to family planning will have a significant impact on her community, because a lot of the funding is used to support education programs. In her 17 years working for Planned Parenthood, she said she has noticed that education efforts have resonated with many Hispanic families, who have opted to have fewer children in an effort to better support them. She said she is not sure if the clinics will be able to continue doing outreach work in these communities, particularly if more than half of them have to close, as Gonzalez predicts.

According to a Planned Parenthood report (PDF) based on statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2007, the pregnancy rate among women 15 to 44 in Hidalgo County was 114.8 per 1,000 females and 103.2 per 1,000 females in Starr County — compared to a rate of 93.3/1,000 in Texas. Reported legal abortions in these counties made up 2.27 percent of the 77,089 abortions in the whole state. From 2007 to 2008, incidents of Chlamydia increased by 765 cases throughout the Rio Grande Valley, with the largest increase in Hidalgo County, which saw about 600 more cases than were reported the previous year.

In August 2010, The Nation reported on this trend for poor pregnant women who cross the border to obtain abortifacients in Mexico, noting that the abortion-inducing drug of choice in many border town pharmacies is misoprostol, which can be purchased over the counter because it is also used to treat ulcers — and makes up half of the two-drug combination prescribed for medical abortions in the United States (the other half is mifepristone). The National Institutes of Health warns pregnant women not to take misoprostol to prevent ulcers because it may cause miscarriages, premature labor or birth defects.

José Camacho, executive director at the Texas Association of Community Health Centers told TAI that the proposed federal and state budget cuts will likely lead to several center closures, impacting approximately 230,000 women in Texas. (Due to the $600 million cut from funding to the federal Community Health Centers program, 5 million Americans without insurance will lose health care access, according the National Association of Community Health Centers.)

“The problem is, given the cuts at the federal level, we’re not given new capacity,” Camacho said. “We will not be able to pick up all of these women. We will try very hard.”

“It’s an effective death sentence,” he added, noting that many people will go without cancer and STD screenings and treatment.

Recently proposed federal and state family-planning spending cuts would disproportionately hinder low-income Latinas’ access to reproductive care, said several women’s reproductive care providers and advocates during a teleconference organized this week by Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Clinic directors from local Planned Parenthood affiliates near predominately Hispanic communities illustrated how federal and state legislation might impact low-income Hispanic women, many of whom are uninsured and rely on grant-funded services offered by Planned Parenthood or other community health clinics to obtain low-cost contraception, gynecological exams, testing for sexually transmitted diseases and family-planning education.

“Threats to Planned Parenthood at the federal level mean threats to our ability to provide vital primary and prenatal care to Latinas and their families via Medicaid,” said Guadalupe Rodriguez, director of public affairs at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, whose health centers serve 29 counties in California.

Despite threats from the Republican-led U.S. House, the approved 2011 budget maintained Planned Parenthood funding for family planning services; however, in the final spending plan, programs that provide low-cost reproductive health care access and pregnancy prevention received significant cuts. The appropriation to Title X of the Public Health Service Act was reduced from $317 million to $300 million, and the budget cut approximately $500 million from the Women, Infants, and Children program, which provides federal grants to states for supplemental food, health care referrals and nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding and non-breast feeding postpartum women, as well as infants and children up to age 5 who are found to be “at a nutritional risk.”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Hispanic population grew by 43 percent during the past decade, to 50.5 million people, making up 16 percent of the total U.S. population. In 2009, 23 percent of Planned Parenthood patients nationwide, approximately 620,000 people, were Hispanic, said Destiny Lopez, director of Latino engagement at Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She noted that the number of male Hispanic patients increased by 191 percent in the last decade.

Lopez said that in the nine states where the Hispanic population more than doubled between 2000 and 2010, in all but one have several measures — such as family planning cuts, abortion restrictions and abstinence-only education programs — been introduced that could potentially restrict access to reproductive health care.

“With the attacks on women’s health care in Congress and in the states, even more Latinas could be cut off from basic reproductive health care like birth control, cancer screenings, and other essential services,” said Elizabeth Barajas-Román, director of policy at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.

Barajas-Román said that women with* legal status have to wait five years to qualify for public health care, including access to reproductive services such as birth control. These cuts will make it even harder for these women to get care, she said.

In Texas — where Latinos make up 37 percent of the state’s population, according to 2009 census figures — the state House voted this month to cut $60 million from family planning programs in their version of the state budget.

Last year, the federal government designated $155 million in new funding for the Personal Responsibility Education Program, a state grant program that funds sex education that includes information on abstinence, contraception and pregnancy- and STD-prevention. But state lawmakers only have until the end of the month to decide whether to apply for approximately $9 million of this grant money — meaning they might not put in a request.

“The [Texas] House budget looks terrible,” said Patricio Gonzalez, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Association of Hidalgo County, the seventh-largest county in Texas, located on the Texas-Mexican border.

Gonzalez said the funding cut proposal translates into nearly 70 percent in cuts to family planning services, which he predicted would lead to the shutdown of eight to 10 of his clinics, affecting approximately 18,000 women.

Lillian Tamayo, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of South Florida and the Treasure Coast, which covers Key West to Indian River, said that Hispanic women make up 20 percent of the population in her area and have disproportionately higher pregnancy, birth and cancer rates.

“The Florida Legislature, rather than being concerned on the creation of jobs, what they’ve done is dismantle women’s rights and attack women’s health,” Tamayo said, noting the 18 bills the state has introduced related to reproductive rights restrictions. ”It’s a wholesale attack on women.”

*Correction: Previously TAI reported that Barajas-Román said that women without legal status have to wait five years to qualify for health care, when in fact she was referring to women with legal status. We regret the error.

That 2003 Oklahoma law was one of several around the country modeled after Texas’ 2001 DREAM Act, for which the failed federal bill that would grant residency to any undocumented alien “of good moral character” who works toward getting a college degree was named. Now, just months after the federal DREAM Act fell apart in the U.S. Senate, the Texas law that started it all 10 years ago may be in danger. No fewer than three bills have been introduced in the Texas legislature that propose to follow Oklahoma’s lead and roll back in-state tuition benefits to undocumented students.

The Texas Independent reported back in December that state Rep. Tim Kleinschmidt (R-Lexington) had filed House Bill 464, which would bar any non-legal resident of the U.S. from seeking in-state tuition at a Texas college or university. The bill has been in the House State Affairs Committee since February. It’s joined in that committee by HB 623, introduced by state Rep. Dennis Bonnen (R-Angleton). Bonnen’s bill, in addition to advocating immigration enforcement by state police and declaring English the state language (More than 31 percent of Texans speak a language other than English at home, according to the U.S. Census), would require all college applicants to provide documentation of legal residence in the U.S. in order to be considered a resident of the state of Texas. And HB 1927, filed by state Rep. Bill Zedler (R-Arlington), would set the tuition rate for undocumented aliens at the highest tuition rate a given college offers. It, too, is in the State Affairs committee.

If any one of those bills passes, Texas would join Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia and South Carolina, which all currently have laws specifically barring undocumented aliens from qualifying for in-state tuition rates. At present, California, New York, Utah, Washington, Illinois, Kansas, New Mexico, Nebraska and Wisconsin all have Texas-inspired laws that grant in-state tuition to undocumented students, and Connecticut’s Democratic-controlled legislature and governor’s office may be set to pass a similar law very soon.  Nebraska’s law was recently threatened by a bill similar to the three in Texas, but it was overwhelmingly voted down in committee last month. Nebraska state Sen. Charlie Janssen (R-Fremont) said that the law is in violation of federal regulations; opponents of DREAM Acts in Texas and other states have often instead attacked in-state tuition for undocumented aliens as a misuse of state money.

Texas Rep. Leo Berman (R-Tyler), a major opponent of the Texas DREAM Act, has repeatedly stated that the annual economic impact of the DREAM Act is negative $42 million in state money. This is about one-seventh of 1 percent of Texas’s estimated $27 billion deficit and pales in comparison to, for example, the nearly $10 billion and rising that obesity costs Texas each year.

Though $42 million is still a sizable sum — if it’s accurate. Berman has not provided any information as to where this number comes from, but there are some publicly available statistics that his team might be drawing from. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board estimated that in the fall 2009 semester, 12,138 students in the state benefited from the state DREAM Act. Not all of them are illegal immigrants, but presumably all of them would be impacted by the repeal of the law, so any attempt to look at the financial impact of repeal would have to include them.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) estimates that, based on the average breakdown between community college and four-year university enrollment among illegal immigrants and the tuition differences at both types of institutions in Texas, the average undocumented student in Texas gets $3,370 in taxpayer money toward tuition each year. If all 12,138 affected students were to pay the difference following a repeal, Texas would be looking at an additional $40,905,060 in revenue each year — pretty close to Berman’s number.  And yet the notion that Texas could earn back more than $40 million in tax dollars each year by repealing its DREAM Act is deeply flawed.

The CIS has also done studies on income among illegal immigrants, and it has found that 65 percent of illegal immigrants in Texas live in or near poverty. Certainly, it is possible that the remaining 35 percent of illegal immigrants not living in or near poverty are overrepresented among those who go to college. But the $8.4 million that undocumented students get in financial aid each year means that they still qualify for financial need at almost twice the rate of the general student population — and may indeed do so at a considerably higher rate, as the figure of $8.4 million dates back to an average from 2004 to 2008, while the total amount of financial aid more than quintupled between 2000 and 2010.

Following a repeal of the DREAM Act, undocumented students would have to either count on a much larger amount of financial aid, which would deeply cut into Berman’s estimated $42 million windfall, or simply give up on higher education. Also throwing a wrench into Berman’s numbers is the fact that Texas does not have state income tax. The biggest state contributor by far to Texas revenue is sales tax, which of course applies equally to all consumers regardless of immigration status. If Berman wants to say that taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for non-taxpayers’ education, he should limit his argument to the federal income tax the state of Texas receives, accounting for 42.2 percent of its total revenue. His $42 million is therefore funded to the tune of about $17.7 million by payers of income tax in Texas. Given a population of almost 24.8 million people, repealing the DREAM Act would save the average Texan about 72 cents on their tax returns.

On the other hand, if a federal DREAM Act were to eventually pass in U.S. Congress and undocumented immigrants were allowed to legally live and work in Texas or any other state after getting degrees, the presence of thousands more educated members of the workforce in Texas could have some major long-term benefits for the state. The University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service estimates that each dollar a state spends on higher education produces more than $13 in job-creating economic activity and an additional $1.39 in tax revenue.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, both sides seem to think the study confirms their beliefs: Advocates of the policy said the study showed it was successful in driving out immigrants, while critics pointed to findings that crime and spending were mostly unchanged by the policy.

The study, which was a three-year project by the University of Virginia’s Center for Survey Research, looked at a variety of factors to determine the impact of a policy meant to drive out illegal immigrants. Since it was modified in 2008, the policy has required police officers to check the immigration status when they make arrests. Originally, the policy required checks only if the officer suspected the person was an illegal immigrant — much like Arizona’s SB 1070 — prompting fear of racial profiling and backlash against Latinos.

Although the Latino population dropped following the policy’s implementation, experts cautioned there could be a number of other reasons for the change, such as a sluggish economy and few jobs in sectors like construction:

“I think the policy had an effect on the ground in the direction it was intended, but it also came at a time of a very sharp economic downtown, which also contributed to changes in population … and migration behaviors,” said Brookings Institution demographer Audrey Singer, who focuses on race and U.S. immigration policy. “I think the researchers are being very careful with what they say because they can’t get a very hard estimate.”

The policy was intended to reduce crime and lower spending on social services to illegal immigrants. But the University of Virginia study found that overall crime has been on the decline in Prince William County for the past 10 years — including the years when many undocumented immigrants moved to the country.

Undocumented immigrants only made up a small number — about 6 percent — of those arrested for serious crimes in the county in 2009. The study’s authors said there was no noticeable impact on crime from the immigration enforcement policy and that social service spending remained about the same. Implementing and maintaining the policy cost the county about $3 million.

Although the study found few reports of racial profiling, some Latino residents said fears of profiling still may have led some Latinos to leave the area and harmed the county’s reputation.

What does the study mean for other counties and states that might want to replicate the Prince William County policy? It depends on who is asked. Prince William Board Chairman Corey A. Stewart (R) said he hopes the study’s findings will help with his push to expand it statewide. But the study’s authors said the lessons from Prince William County should be applied with “great caution” elsewhere.

“This is not a free policy; the board allocated substantial amounts of money” for this, Thomas Guterbock, director of Center for Survey Research, told the Washington Post. “Don’t try this if you don’t want to spend some money.”

In total, he promised to implement 131 recommendations that were made in an administrative report last year on how legal and illegal immigrants could be better integrated into the state. But for some of the changes, including driver’s licenses and in-state tuition, Patrick said he would need Congress to pass immigration reform legislation — something that seems unlikely in the next couple of years.

ICE officials told the Associated Press that 36 of the 42 bus passengers were in the country illegally and defended its agents’ actions. (Amway declined to comment on whether the alleged undocumented immigrants were Amway product distributors.)

The bus was reportedly targeted after a Spanish-speaking ICE agent heard some of the passengers speaking in Spanish about their long trip — causing her to suspect the bus was smuggling illegal immigrants.

The ACLU contends the raid took place because of racial stereotyping because the passengers were speaking Spanish.

“This is a case of racial profiling and ethnic stereotyping at its very worst,” Mark Silverstein, ACLU Legal Director, said in a press release. “An ICE agent targeted our clients for speaking Spanish in an Omaha fast-food restaurant. Speaking Spanish is not a crime, nor does it provide any basis for immigration officers to start demanding papers or otherwise launch any investigation.”

After ICE officials boarded the bus, they directed it to drive to a local ICE facility, where passengers were searched, questioned and processed. The ACLU filed the complaint on behalf of two citizens, Arquimides Bautista and Rosalba Artimas, who said they were fingerprinted and forced to pose for mug shots before they were released.

Update: ICE spokesman Carl Rusnok sent the following statement on the situation:

In April 2010, two officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), based on their 29 years combined immigration-enforcement experience, suspected that the bus in question may be used for smuggling illegal aliens. Their initial inquiries immediately identified two illegal aliens. After further investigation and questioning, the ICE agents identified that 36 of the 42 passengers on the bus were in the United States illegally. Both ICE agents happen to be Hispanic themselves, and native Spanish speakers. No racial profiling was involved in detaining the bus or its passengers.

Ultimately, 17 of the 36 were immediately released on their own recognizance on humanitarian grounds after they were issued notices to appear before a federal immigration judge. The remaining 19 passengers were detained and bonded out of ICE custody.

Of the 36 illegal alien passengers on the bus, one had been previously deported; it’s a felony to re-enter the United States after being deported. In addition, one was a fugitive who already had already been ordered deported by a federal immigration judge; and three others had previous criminal convictions.

ICE is focused on smart, effective immigration enforcement that prioritizes efforts first on those dangerous criminal aliens who present the greatest risk to the security of our communities, not sweeps or raids to target undocumented immigrants indiscriminately. ICE agents cannot turn a blind eye to immigration enforcement issues that they observe, especially when they may involve a case of human smuggling.

Since this case is pending litigation, no further information can be discussed at this time.

Currently, only three states — Utah, New Mexico and Washington — allow undocumented immigrants to obtain driving privileges. According to immigrant advocates, it’s a question of public safety: Since so many of them will find a way to drive regardless, everyone’s better off if they’re properly licensed, have taken the requisite driving tests and are unafraid to cooperate with the police.

But now, all three of those states are considering measures that could restrict undocumented immigrants’ ability to drive or revoke it outright. And the proposals have pretty broad popular support. Elise Foley has the story.

Only three states, New Mexico, Utah and Washington, give driving rights to residents regardless of their immigration status. (iStock photo)

New Mexico, Washington and Utah are currently the only states that allow undocumented immigrants to drive. But in all three states, immigrants face threats to their right to drive as agencies step up residency proof requirements or politicians argue for eliminating illegal immigrants’ driving privileges altogether.

[Immigration1] Backlash against driving rights for illegal immigrants is nothing new: After 9/11, a few groups lobbied hard at the state level to change laws that allowed undocumented immigrants to receive licenses, claiming they could be used by terrorists to assume false identities.

Anti-terrorist fervor has since died down, but the push to clamp down on illegal immigration has not, and measures to take away driving rights for the undocumented have broad support. In New Mexico, for instance, Governor-elect Susana Martinez, a tough-on-immigration Republican, said last week that she has the public’s backing to change laws that allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses.

“Around 80 percent of people in New Mexico don’t want the people who are here illegally to have a driver’s license,” Martinez said on Univision Nov. 7. “They want to ensure that those who get licenses are from the United States.”

Advocates of licenses for illegal immigrants say they put more money in states’ coffers through vehicle registration and licensing fees. They also increase the number of licensed drivers, who must undergo tests and are required to buy insurance. This increases overall public safety, according to proponents, because licensed drivers are, overall, less likely to be involved in serious car crashes. One-fifth of fatal car crashes involve at least one unlicensed driver, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

“There is this hysteria at the national level that somehow people were able to use these documents to do harmful things, when really these people are just using the documents to drive, buy insurance and register their vehicles,” said Marcela Diaz of Somos Un Pueblo Unido, an immigrant rights group in New Mexico that opposes changes to driver’s license laws. “We live in a state with very little public transportation. People drive because there really is no alternative.”

In Utah, immigrants may face another threat to driving rights if conservative state lawmakers succeed at passing broad immigration enforcement legislation based on Arizona’s SB 1070.

The state established a driver’s privilege card in 2005 for people who lived in the state but could not provide Social Security numbers. Now, though, immigrant rights advocates argue the card’s benefits could be undermined by a bill proposed by state Rep. Stephen Sandstrom (R). The bill would require police officers to check immigration status on people they arrest and can reasonably suspect to be illegal immigrants. It would also allow immigration enforcement officials to access the databases for driver’s privilege cards.

If passed, Sandstrom’s bill would likely discourage many undocumented immigrants from getting driver’s privilege cards, according to immigration lawyers. The law would allow police and federal immigration agents to access the database for driving privilege cards, which legislators promised would not be shared with police when the cards were created in 2005. The databases include international birth certificates, but generally immigration attorneys can keep the card from being used as evidence in deportation hearings because civil rights laws forbid police in non-border states from asking immigration status for non-immigration-related crimes.

Opponents of the bill say it is unconstitutional, in part because it would allow access to the database. And the mere existence of a driver’s privilege card would provide reason to suspect a driver of being undocumented, since U.S. citizens living in Utah would have a Utah driver’s license, which can be used for official purposes other than driving.

“If his legislation gets to be implemented, you will effectively be getting rid of the driving-privilege card,” state Sen. Luz Robles (D), who opposes the law, told the Salt Lake Tribune.

Washington’s state Department of Licensing implemented new requirements Nov. 8 to try to keep Washington licenses out of the hands people who do not reside in the state after the Associated Press reported in August that more undocumented immigrants were seeking licenses in Washington, New Mexico and Utah after Arizona passed SB 1070. Washington allows people who do not have Social Security numbers to receive licenses if they meet other requirements and live in the state. Now applicants who cannot provide Social Security numbers are required to give a valid Washington address, proven by documentation such as a rental agreement. (It is illegal to rent to undocumented immigrants in some, but not all, jurisdictions.)

The idea is to eliminate instances of fraud, and to prevent undocumented immigrants from other parts of the country from traveling to Washington to get driver’s licenses even though they do not live there. In Maryland, which stopped giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants in 2009, authorities said fraud became a major problem when Maryland became the only state in the east that gave driver’s licenses to people without Social Security numbers. Many states banned illegal immigrants from receiving driving rights between 2001 and 2005, when Congress passed the Real ID Act mandating strict regulations for driver’s licenses accepted for official federal purposes. The act didn’t overhaul driver’s license laws — 17 states passed legislation to undercut the act — but it set the course for more states to end practices that gave illegal immigrants licenses.

The last major effort to expand driving rights, by then-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D), ended in 2007 when Spitzer encountered heavy opposition to the proposal.

Maryland licenses were frequently obtained by out-of-state illegal immigrants who gave addresses to Maryland P.O. boxes or proved their residency using cell phone bills addressed to addresses where they didn’t reside. Some states, including Colorado, Arizona and Oklahoma, stopped accepting Maryland driver’s licenses for people who moved to the state to obtain new licenses.

In response to these concerns, Maryland instituted a new law on June 1, 2009, requiring immigrants to prove they were in the country legally to receive a driver’s license. Undocumented immigrants who previously received licenses were allowed to apply for one-time driving permits that will expire in 2015.

Washington made a better choice by continuing to allow illegal immigrants to receive licenses, said Tyler Moran, policy director for National Immigration Law Center, which supports driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants.

“That’s not a bad policy if they’re going to preserve licenses for everybody,” she said. “They’re intended for state residents, and states have every right to ensure people are actually residing in the state they apply for a license in.”

Moran, who has tracked the issue for a few years, said she hopes lawmakers in New Mexico and Utah will be successful at stopping efforts to take away or discourage driving rights for undocumented immigrants.

“The New Mexico law has been around for quite some time now and has seen this type of attack repeatedly,” she said. “Policy-makers have continually stood up and said this is good public policy for New Mexico. I’m hoping the state policy-makers will do the same next year.”

“Allowing undocumented students to attend primary and secondary schools but requiring that they pay out-of-state tuition for college creates an unfair financial burden that many, even very talented, students cannot overcome,” Diaz-Balart said in a press release. “We should stop hampering these deserving students’ educational opportunities due to the decisions of their parents and allow a vote on the American DREAM Act.”

I explain some of the votes up in the air in our preview of the lame-duck session today. Pelosi has said she hopes to call for a vote on the bill, as has Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). But so far, it’s unclear whether the Democratic leadership has the votes to pass the bill, with some members of the Democratic caucus likely to break with the party to vote against the bill.

For immigrant rights groups, the stakes are high: If the DREAM Act cannot pass with Democrat majorities in both the House and the Senate, it will almost certainly be delayed until at least 2013, when Democrats could again take control of Congress. Immigrant rights groups are stepping up their efforts by staging protests and lobbying politicians to vote for the bill.

One reason supporters want the bill passed this year, beyond the obvious desire to provide more immediate relief to undocumented immigrants, is to prevent further problems with the DREAM Act’s age constraints. The current bill would allow undocumented immigrants who had attended two years of college or served in the military for two years to gain legal status if they had a clean permanent record and were under the age of 35.

For some, that age sounds too high — people who are in their 30s may no longer be students, whom the bill is theoretically meant to help. But Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the chief sponsor of the bill, said in October he wants to help those the bill was initially aimed at when it first came up in 2001 — some of whom may now be reaching the upper age limits of the bill.

If the bill is delayed, future efforts could raise the upper age cutoff — at the risk of losing some votes — or would no longer benefit those immigrants, some of whom have been advocating for the bill for years.

California is one of 10 states that allow undocumented students to receive in-state tuition as long as they meet other requirements. In California, that means attending high school in the state for at least three years. But an anti-illegal immigration group brought a suit against the state on behalf of 42 out-of-state students ineligible for in-state tuition, claiming the law violated a federal ban on educational benefits based on residency for illegal immigrants.

A legal challenge was led by Kris Kobach, secretary of state-elect for Kansas and an immigration hardliner who helped draft Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law. Kobach attempted a similar legal challenge against in-state tuition for undocumented students in Kansas, but that lawsuit failed in 2009.

This time, Kobach won the lawsuit in the first round, but the state Supreme Court now shut down his effort. In a ruling written by Justice Ming W. Chin, the Court found the law was constitutional because American citizens who attended at least three years of high school in the state are also eligible for in-state tuition.

“That section does not treat citizens worse than unlawful aliens,” Chin wrote. “It grants the same exemption to all who qualify, whether they are nonresident citizens or resident unlawful aliens.”