Minnesota taxpayers will be on the hook for $3.3 million in attorneys’ fees after the state unsuccessfully sought to ban certain religious institutions from participating in the state’s Post-Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO) program.
The longstanding PSEO program allows high school students to earn college credits for free. The law in question was passed in 2023 by the DFL-controlled legislature and prohibited religious colleges from requiring on-campus PSEO students to sign a faith statement attesting to the institution’s beliefs and values.
It also forbade schools from basing “any part of the admission decision on a student’s race, creed, ethnicity, disability, gender, or sexual orientation or religious beliefs or affiliations.”
The law was immediately challenged in court by Crown College and the University of Northwestern-St. Paul, along with concerned parents, who were represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
“In the last six years, the Supreme Court has three times held that once a state opens funding to private institutions, the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause forbids excluding participants based on their religion or their religious use of the funds,” they said in their lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel agreed with the plaintiffs and struck down the law “in its entirety as facially unconstitutional” in August 2025.
In a July 28 order this year, Brasel ordered the state to pay $3.3 million in attorneys’ fees and expenses to the plaintiffs, writing that “the volume of hours Becket expended reflects the demands of sophisticated and successful constitutional litigation against a well‐resourced government defendant.”
The defendants in the case, the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and Commissioner Willie Jett, were represented by Attorney General Keith Ellison’s Office.
“Prevailing counsel who achieved complete relief—as Plaintiffs did here—are entitled to a ‘fully compensatory fee,’” Brasel wrote.
“Nor can MDE ‘litigate tenaciously and then be heard to complain about the time necessarily spent by the plaintiff in response,’” she continued. “MDE asserted counterclaims and sought expanded discovery; Plaintiffs urged the Court to decide the case on summary judgment without expanded discovery.”
House Republican Floor Leader Harry Niska, R-Ramsey, noted that his caucus “warned Democrats in 2023 that targeting colleges because of their religious beliefs was blatantly unconstitutional and would be struck down by the courts, but Democrats refused to listen.”
“The plaintiffs had to sue to protect their U.S. Constitutional rights, and then they had to endure a long legal process to defend themselves after the Walz administration and Attorney General Ellison counter-sued them. This was clearly done to punish these two colleges for merely exercising their religious freedoms,” said Niska.
“Attorney General Ellison countersuing and continuing to defend a law he should have known was unconstitutional is inexcusable,” he continued. “Now taxpayers are stuck with a $3.3 million bill for Democrats’ attack on religious freedom. This entire mess was entirely predictable, completely avoidable, and an indefensible waste of taxpayer dollars.”
Anthony Gockowski
Anthony Gockowski is Editor-in-Chief of Alpha News. He previously worked as an editor for The Minnesota Sun and Campus Reform, and wrote for the Daily Caller.
