President Donald Trump’s administration is breaking the law in not granting loan relief to students defrauded by Corinthian Colleges and other defunct for-profit schools, according to four U.S. state attorneys general who sued the Education Department and Secretary Betsy DeVos, Reuters reported. In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, the top law enforcement officers of New York, Illinois and Massachusetts also said the administration has unlawfully declared that some of the loans are still valid, which has led to involuntary collections from students’ paychecks. Separately, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra filed a parallel complaint in the U.S. District Court in Northern California. According to Becerra, 13,000 former Corinthian students in his state are waiting for the federal government to forgive their loans. The lawsuits come after months of pressure from states, borrower advocates and Democratic lawmakers, who say students cannot repay the often-large debts because the schools did not give them adequate work training or diplomas. By law, anyone the government determines was a victim of education fraud is not required to pay student loan debt. In the final days of his administration, President Barack Obama approved rules speeding up the debt cancellations. DeVos has delayed implementing those rules, saying they would create significant costs for taxpayers. Tens of thousands of defaulted borrowers with pending applications for relief are seeing interest charged for the loans mount and their credit scores drop, and are often unable to get additional financial aid to return to school. Since Trump’s inauguration, the department has received 25,991 claims for discharging loans. It has denied two requests and approved none, the inspector general found.
