Trump axed support for tribal and Hispanic-serving colleges. They’re not happy about it.

WASHINGTON – Last October, Antonio Flores peered over the president’s left shoulder.

Though a nail-biting national election was less than a week away, the mood in the Oval Office was celebratory. Happy tears welled up in the eyes of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, who flanked the president’s other side.

Clad in a dark suit and purple-blue tie, Flores, the head of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, stood just behind Joe Biden as he brandished a new executive order at the Resolute Desk. The decree created, for the first time, a presidential advisory board on Hispanic-serving institutions, or HSIs: colleges where at least a quarter of undergraduate students are Hispanic.

“This pen belongs to you, pal,” Biden said as he handed the ceremonial keepsake to his emotional education secretary.

Three months later, with another stroke of a different pen, President Donald Trump reversed it all.

As part of a flurry of actions on his first day back in office, Trump rescinded several of Biden's orders that established key supports for colleges and universities serving marginalized students. He scrapped Executive Order 14124, which staffed an Education Department office to steer more funding to HSIs (and designed the presidential advisory board of HSI leaders). He also nixed Executive Order 14049, which outlined the same types of assistance for tribal colleges and universities.

The sudden demise of a plan years in the making stung Flores.

“Not only is it detrimental to the institutions involved, but to the nation,” Flores said in an interview following the reversal. He said HSI leaders have felt "at a loss" over the past week.

“We need to start from zero again," he said.

Then, on Monday, the Trump administration mandated an unexpected federal funding pause across government agencies. During a meeting Tuesday hosted by the American Council on Education, college officials agonized over what the freeze would mean for minority-serving schools. That order was temporarily halted by a judge on Tuesday before the administration bowed to widespread pressure Wednesday and rescinded the directive altogether, leaving college leaders with a sense of whiplash.

The Education Department did not respond to a request to clarify why Trump revoked the measures to strengthen HSIs and tribal schools. Over the past week, leaders at minority-serving colleges have said their institutions are being arbitrarily targeted by the new administration.

“We’re unfairly being put in the diversity, equity and inclusion group,” said Chief Dan King, president of Red Lake Nation College, a tribal community college in Minnesota. “Republicans actually like what we’re doing.”

Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican who oversaw education policy for the GOP in the U.S. House of Representatives, said as recently as December that tribal colleges "play an important role in serving students and expanding the opportunities for skills and a postsecondary education in communities across America.”

Hispanic-serving colleges are 'door-openers'

The Trump administration’s move to pull specific supports for HSIs comes at an especially challenging time for Hispanic students and their families.

Last year, a crisis in federal college financial aid disproportionately impacted them, after glitches with a new version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, failed to accommodate parents and students without Social Security numbers (a problem that has since been addressed).

Click here for a timeline: How did the FAFSA rollout go so wrong? A look at the key events

Mixed-status families – in which family members have varying immigration and citizenship statuses – were hit hardest by the delays in the college enrollment process. Ultimately, some of those students were deterred from going to college altogether.

Because of systemic barriers like these, the federal government designates some colleges as HSIs, freeing up more funding opportunities to guide students from marginalized groups toward success. There are more than 600 HSIs in the U.S. across 28 states, according to the latest available numbers.

“They really are door-openers,” said Melody Gonzales, who served in the Biden administration as the executive director of the White House Hispanic Initiative (a program Trump has since dismantled).

Now that the FAFSA challenges have faded, a new set of worries is setting in for Hispanic families since Trump regained the White House. The president's harsh immigration rhetoric on the campaign trail has led some college advocacy groups to fret over whether his administration would attempt to use FAFSA information to target students with undocumented family members.

Protections in federal law prevent that data from being used for anything other than determining financial aid eligibility, experts say. However, concerns about submitting FAFSA forms have spread among families nonetheless.

'Confusion' and 'anger' at tribal colleges

The past week brought confusion, anger and frustration to the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Montana, said Brad Hall, the president of Blackfeet Community College. Trump’s decision to axe assistance for schools like his and the now-defunct funding freeze prompted him to create an action plan – he was preparing Wednesday morning to draw down all available federal funds.

Administrators like him were dizzied by the onslaught of changes influencing their campuses.

“No one can focus on the mission of our college with this level of uncertainty,” he said.

The American Indian Higher Education Consortium is calling on Trump to issue a new executive order reaffirming the importance of the nation’s roughly 40 tribal colleges.

“To be clear, the conversation around diversity, equity, and inclusion is entirely separate and distinct from the matter of Tribal Sovereignty," the group’s president, Ahniwake Rose, said in a statement to USA TODAY.

Asked about advocates' request for a new presidential order on tribal schools, the Education Department deferred comment to the White House Wednesday. The White House did not respond to USA TODAY's request for comment.

Trump takes aim at college DEI programs

The decrees relating to schools serving marginalized populations came as President Trump signed a broader measure to curb diversity, equity and inclusion programs and staff across the federal workforce. DEI, a nebulous term that has become highly politicized in recent years, typically refers to organizational frameworks that promote fair treatment for everyone, especially people from historically marginalized groups.

Trump’s efforts to weed out DEI from the federal bureaucracy are already impacting the nation’s education system. The federal Education Department said last Thursday it was preparing to scrub hundreds of webpages of DEI resources for K-12 schools and colleges. Its sites about HSIs and tribal colleges have since vanished. (A similar webpage dedicated to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs, has remained online.)

The executive order on DEI requires the new attorney general and education secretary to draft fresh guidelines for colleges to comply with the Supreme Court’s ban on race-conscious admissions. It also directs the Education Department to investigate colleges with endowments larger than $1 billion to ensure they comply with the new rules.

Paulette Granberry Russell, the president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, said a chilling effect from Trump’s executive orders may result in schools “overcorrecting.”

“It's offensive, the ways that others have chosen to demonize opportunities for all,” she said.

Some colleges have already begun scrapping their DEI initiatives. Others are replanning their academic calendars – they're canceling events geared toward students and faculty of color.

Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and Bluesky at @zachschermele.bsky.social.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump axed help for tribal and Hispanic colleges. They’re not happy.