Joy Pullman writes for the Federalist website about “the border hoppers liberals don’t love.”
Washington DC’s attorney general recently sued a married couple, alleging they had illegally enrolled their three children in well-regarded local public schools despite living outside the District, and demanding more than $224,000 in back tuition. Reached by the Washington Post at home, Alan Hill, the father named in the lawsuit, sounded bewildered: “We are in the middle of this process and still trying to understand it.”
“The issue of nonresidents enrolling in D.C. public schools is often heated, particularly as students compete for a limited number of seats in highly sought-after schools,” the Post reports. “Parents often talk of sitting on wait lists for schools while they see drivers with license plates from neighboring states lining up to drop off their children.”
Clear across the country in Berkeley, California, the local school district also combats illegal enrollees at the behest of annoyed residents. Framed by poorer-performing school districts—most notably Oakland, a high-violence locale—Berkeley Unified School District has proven to be irresistible to parents desperately seeking a better life for their kids despite their inability to pay district housing prices. …
… Last year, Lower Moreland public schools, in a Philadelphia community, took Hamlet and Olesia Garcia to court for enrolling their eight-year-old daughter there instead of in lower-performing northwest Philadelphia schools. The family settled out of court, at a cost of some $81,000 in back tuition and legal fees. Hamlet is an immigrant from Cuba. …
… Here’s the irony: Berkeley, Philadelphia, and Washington DC are “sanctuary cities,” where local law enforcement or other government bodies have openly declared they won’t enforce illegal immigration laws—at least, not against foreign citizens. The University of California-Berkeley is a national leader in openly enrolling and providing tax-sponsored tuition writeoffs and other supports to illegal immigrants. So while these city governments welcome illegal foreign immigrants to, among other things, enroll their kids in local schools (the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that public schools must educate illegal immigrants), those same local schools are prosecuting U.S. citizens for doing the same thing.