Subcommittee Ranking Member Scanlon’s Opening Statement at Hearing on Republicans’ Plan to Kick Kids Out of Schools
Washington, D.C. (March 18, 2026)—Today, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, delivered opening remarks at a hearing examining how Republicans want to kick kids out of schools—another front in the Trump Administration’s ongoing war on children.
Below are Subcommittee Ranking Member Scanlon’s remarks at today’s hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Scanlon’s opening statement.
Ranking Member Mary Gay Scanlon
Subcommittee on Constitution and Limited Government
“Immigration Policy by Court Order: The Adverse Effects of Plyler v. Doe”
March 18, 2026
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
50 years ago, Texas passed a law seeking to ban children who were not legally admitted to the country from our public schools and to defund their education. The state argued that this ban was necessary to preserve its resources for educating its lawful residents, and argued that these children were not persons under our Constitution. The Supreme Court disagreed. In 1982, the court struck down the Texas statute in Plyler v. Doe, rejecting the argument that children did not count as persons entitled to equal protection under the 14th Amendment.
The Court also found Texas’s economic arguments to be unconvincing and the exclusion of undocumented children from public schools, and unlikely and ineffective way to achieve the true underlying objective of addressing and ultimately repelling an influx of undocumented immigrants. Even conservative Chief Justice Burger, while rejecting the majority’s reasoning, wrote, “It is senseless for an enlightened society to deprive any children, including illegal aliens, of an elementary education,” and agreed that, “it would be folly and wrong to tolerate creation of a segment of society made up of illiterate persons.” He also noted that “the long range cost of excluding any children from our public schools may well outweigh the costs of educating them.” For a generation, the issue was deemed settled, but bigotry and bad ideas die hard.
Now, at the urging of the Trump White House, the authors of Project 2025 and their allies, Texas and a few other states seek once again to enshrine bigotry and bad ideas into law. To do so, they’ve mounted a coordinated effort to overturn Plyler v. Doe, making the same arguments that the court previously rejected.
But if anything, the intervening years have put to rest the argument that the public education of undocumented children imposes a net economic burden upon the states or somehow harms public education and services offered to lawful residents. In fact, the overwhelming majority of credible studies from both conservative and mainstream entities, including the Congressional Budget Office, have consistently found that the net economic impact of immigration is overwhelmingly positive. Most recently, the Congressional Budget Office issued a finding that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, generated a $14.5 trillion fiscal surplus over the last 20 years.
When one compares the tax contributions of those immigrants to the limited, very limited public benefits that they consume, even in Texas, the purported subject of this hearing, the net fiscal impact of immigration during the 40-year Plyler period, including the cost of public education, has a net of $93 billion to the benefit of the state. In addition, we now have decades of data showing the public health, developmental, civic, humanitarian and social impact of providing public education to immigrant children regardless of their legal status, no matter the rhetoric coming from the other side of the aisle.
The fact is that our Republican colleagues have brought us here today to advocate for kicking kids out of school. Reversing Plyler v. Doe would mean that children as young as kindergarten and through high school would be denied a basic education left out of society, and held back from reaching their potential and meaningfully, meaningfully contributing to America. This isn’t just terrible education policy. It’s extremely harmful to vulnerable children. It’s also bad for our country’s health, workforce and economy.
The Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe guaranteed equal access to free public K-12 education for all children living in the United States, regardless of their immigration status. The court recognized in Plyler that education provides the basic tools by which individuals might lead economically productive lives to the benefit of us all. And in the 44 years since, the children who’ve benefited from these protections, including some who have since become citizens and legal permanent residents, have grown up to contribute immensely to our country.
A report by Fwd.US found that Plyler beneficiaries have driven economic growth by paying over $633 billion more in state and local taxes than their public educations cost, preventing over 700,000 U.S. citizen children from falling into poverty, increasing GDP by 2.71 trillion over their lifetimes. These are again the accomplishments of the Plyler beneficiaries. They’ve strengthened the workforce with over 1 million people filling U.S. jobs, and they’ve reduced health care costs by at least $28 billion since 1982.
Additionally, other students have found that having immigrant children in K-12 classrooms improved the academic outcomes for their us born classmates, lifting up entire communities. Public schools are a crucial part of our social fabric. They’re places where kids can learn, make friends, dream about their futures and develop the skills they need to contribute to those futures and our society. Robbing some children of that foundation would wind up hurting all children and America as a whole. It’s a cruel attempt to senselessly punish undocumented children for their parents’ decisions, choices they had no role in. And it’s all based on a false assertion that giving undocumented children a public education is a burden on taxpayers. It bears dangerous similarity to other attempts to exclude children, including children with disabilities, from public education, according to a June 2025 analysis from Niskanen Center.
The tax revenue from undocumented workers alone covers the annual cost of educating undocumented children. Of course, the effort is part of an ill-conceived effort to end immigration to this country, a country that is famously one formed by immigrants, but it’s also part of a larger war on children being prosecuted by this white house, a right wing effort to kick kids out of school is just another facet in the ongoing war that is being waged against American children, particularly the effort to undermine public education. President Trump and congressional Republicans’ One Big Ugly Bill ripped health care and food away from millions of kids when enacting the biggest cuts to Medicaid, CHIP and SNAP in our history. This Administration is attempting to undermine and erode vaccine science at a time when measles and other preventable infectious disease outbreaks have killed American children, and Republicans have made callous cuts to childhood cancer research denying families the hope of a cure.
This Administration has decimated the Department of Education, gone after funding for early childhood education programs like Head Start, frozen access to billions of dollars in funding for childcare and family assistance, and cut funding for community violence prevention. ICE is now targeting schools, previously protected areas. in its cruel, chaotic mass deportation efforts, leading to plummeting attendance and fear among entire school communities. Children have been detained in traumatizing conditions and used and used as bait by immigration enforcement agents to lure their parents. Some of us may remember growing up and learning about when in the Bible, Jesus said, “Suffer the little children to come to me,” rejecting the efforts of his disciples to punish their parents’ efforts. But right now, instead of caring for the little children, our country and its leaders are shamefully turning their backs on those little children.
We must firmly reject a worldview that only certain classes of children, those whose parents can afford to pay, are entitled to the blessings of liberty and the hope of a better future. Our kids are our future, and I want to do all we can to make sure that that future is a bright one for everyone’s sake. So this is not the direction that we need to go back here. It’s fundamentally flawed.