White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller met with Texas Republican legislators and pushed them to pass a bill banning undocumented children from public schools, directly challenging the 1982 Supreme Court decision Plyler v. Doe. The landmark ruling held that denying public education to children based on their parents' immigration status violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Miller asked Texas legislators why the Republican-dominated state hadn't passed a bill funding public education only for children who are citizens or 'lawfully present in the United States.' The proposal would affect approximately 100,000 of Texas's 5.5 million schoolchildren. Governor Greg Abbott has expressed support for challenging Plyler.
The strategy is part of Miller's broader effort to destabilize undocumented families and encourage 'self-deportation' by making life unlivable — denying children access to school, challenging birthright citizenship, and replacing equality-based citizenship with what critics describe as 'hereditary' and 'caste-like' frameworks. The cruelty is the point: if you can't deport all 11 million undocumented people, you make their children's lives so miserable that families leave on their own.
This came as reporting revealed that only 14% of ICE arrests in 2025 involved individuals with violent criminal records — contradicting the administration's claim that enforcement targets 'criminals.' The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump himself wants to 'lower the profile of his mass deportation effort' because it's 'hideously unpopular,' with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles viewing it as a midterm election liability. But Miller continues pursuing the most extreme policies regardless of the political messaging.
Denying education to children — who had no choice in where they were born or brought — is the definition of punishing the innocent for the actions of others. The Supreme Court settled this question 44 years ago. Miller wants to unsettle it.
Correction (October 2, 2026): We removed a citation whose link no longer resolves to the cited article and could not be verified: Texas Democratic Party (“Response to Extremist Proposal Targeting Immigrant Children's Education”). The remaining sources are listed below.