Also in Tyler, Humberto Alvarez, a Mexican-born father of four children enrolled in Douglas Elementary School, was told that the Tyler Independent School District would charge undocumented students an annual tuition fee of $1,000 per student, or the equivalent of roughly $5,000 today. Alvarez, who had left his home country in 1974 and started working at a meatpacking plant in Tyler, couldn’t afford the fee, so the requirement effectively excluded his children from the school system. Basically, the statute allowed for different school districts and schools to implement different policies.
These new policies came in the wake of the Texas legislature voting to amend the Education Code with a section, known as 21.03, that withheld state funds from public school districts for the education of children who had not been “legally admitted” into the country. The statute allowed districts to deny enrollment to foreign-born children without legal status, or to charge them tuition. Other school districts in Texas, including the state’s largest district of Houston, implemented similar practices. In Tyler, the school district board of trustees justified the policy as a way to “prevent the potential drain on local educational funds should Tyler become a haven for illegal aliens.” Jim Plyler, the superintendent of Tyler schools at the time, referred to the children as a “burden,” even though only about 60 of the 16,000 enrolled students lacked legal status.
In September 1977, the Robles, the Alvarez, and two other families filed a class-action lawsuit against Plyler arguing the Texas statute violated their constitutional rights. The plaintiffs had been living in Tyler for anywhere between three and 13 years in mixed-status households, where their US-born children who were citizens weren’t barred from school, unlike their Mexican-born siblings. The families were represented by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), a national Latino legal civil rights organization. As University of Houston Law professor Michael A. Olivas (who died in April 2022) wrote in his 2012 book, No Undocumented Child Left Behind: Plyler v. Doe and the Education of Undocumented Schoolchildren, MALDEF’s national director of education litigation, Peter Roos, and the group’s president, Vilma Martinez, considered the case to be the “Mexican American Brown v. Board of Education.”
The group of plaintiffs inspired sympathy: Undocumented children who weren’t responsible for their parents’ decision to migrate, with parents who worked. They also had an ally in William Wayne Justice, a federal judge who was both revered and reviled in rural Texas for his liberal views and for having ordered desegregation in Tyler schools in 1970. On September 14, 1978, Judge Justice ruled that the state’s reasoning that the statute would relieve the school district from a financial burden and regulate immigration was irrational and a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.