(Photo by Matthew Bisanz)

D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson has introduced the “UDC DREAM Amendment Act of 2015,” which would entitle all D.C. residents to in-state tuition and local financial aid at the University of the District of Columbia, regardless of their immigration status.

“Providing these students with in-state tuition and access to local financial aid will allow to them to obtain a post-secondary education and enable them to contribute to the District’s economy,” Mendelson said in a release.

Activists in D.C.’s Latino community have been working for years to win legislation entitling undocumented residents to in-state tuition at the city’s only public university. Currently, annual tuition and fees for full-time resident students at UDC (or, as Vincent Orange would have it, Marion S. Barry, Jr. University of the District of Columbia) is $7,420. The non-resident rate is $14,880.

“It is harmful to halt the progress of the education of these students, who under the constitution are entitled to a public education kindergarten through high school,” said Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, preemptively noting that, if it passes, she would “strongly fight any attempt to overturn it in Congress.”

More than a dozen states have implemented similar DREAM acts, though they, of course, don’t suffer from congressional oversight. Maryland passed legislation in 2012, and Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring last year declared that children of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) are eligible for in-state tuition in the commonwealth.