De La Mota v. United States Department of Education

The United States Department of Education (DOE) (defendant) administered the Perkins student-loan program (the program), which provided government loans to certain students. Congress passed a federal statute offering loan cancellation or reduction for graduates who went into identified public-service careers, including graduates who provided services to high-risk children from low-income communities and the children’s families. The DOE implemented a loan-cancellation regulation that used the statutory language. The DOE also created a loan-cancellation handbook, which added a requirement that a graduate must be providing the services “only” to high-risk children and their families. Marisol De La Mota and two other attorneys (collectively, the attorneys) (plaintiffs) worked for a New York City agency providing legal representation for high-risk, low-income children and their families. Initially, the attorneys’ Perkins loan payments were canceled based on their public-service work. However, a DOE employee then determined that a graduate’s service must also be “directly” for high-risk children. The DOE employee further determined that because the attorneys worked for the city instead of only and directly for children, they did not qualify for loan cancellation. Following the DOE’s guidance, some schools handling the attorneys’ loan-cancellation requests denied their current requests and asked for repayment for prior cancellations. The attorneys sued the DOE in federal district court. The district court determined that the interpretations of the federal statute in the DOE handbook and by the DOE employee were entitled to deference. Under this deference, because the interpretations were not clearly erroneous, the court applied them to find that the attorneys did not qualify for loan cancellation. The attorneys appealed.