JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Missouri lawmakers plan to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of a bill to prevent illegal immigrants from securing state scholarships for higher education.

State Rep. Schott Fitzpatrick is leading a charge to override a veto by Nixon of legislation he sponsored this year to ban state-funded A+ Scholarships for immigrants who came to the country illegally. The issue impacts students who avoided deportation through President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows students brought to the U.S. as children to stay indefinitely.

“I can’t rationalize in my head why we would reward somebody who is breaking the law,” Fitzpatrick told the Kansas City Star.

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“We’re not saying these students are banned from attending college,” he said. “We’re just saying we aren’t going to make the taxpayers of Missouri pay for it. There’s a difference between punishing someone and failing to reward someone.”

Missouri’s Republican controlled General Assembly initially approved Fitzpatrick’s bill this summer, but it was later vetoed by Nixon, who called it a “harsh measure imposed unfairly on children who have done nothing wrong,” according to the news site.

Nixon believes any student who meets the A+ Scholarship requirements – 2.5 GPA, 95 percent attendance, and 50 hours of tutoring or mentor work – deserves tax dollars to attend college. Illegal immigrants are especially deserving because they manage to meet the requirements “while overcoming daunting obstacles such as learning English, living in fear of deportation, and facing the constant stigma of being an alien,” he said.

Following Nixon’s veto, lawmakers injected language into the preamble of a higher education appropriations bill, stating that “no scholarship funds shall be expended on behalf of students with an unlawful immigration status in the United States,” but the Missouri Department of Higher Education issued a letter to the state’s colleges alleging the language is not binding.

That appropriations bill “has no legal authority to withhold scholarship awards from otherwise eligible students,” higher education commissioner David Russell wrote, according to the Star.

Commissioners determined the bill does not prevent DACA students from receiving sate scholarships or in-state tuition rates. That becomes a problem at places like St. Louis Community College, where legal Missouri residents that live outside of the city end up paying more in tuition than illegal immigrants, Fitzpatrick told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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“The more you reward illegal immigration, the worse the problem gets,” he said.

Missouri Republican lawmakers are now planning to override Nixon’s veto on the A+ Scholarship bill, which initially passed the state Senate with more than the two-thirds necessary. That bill passed the state House with 108 votes, just one vote less than the required two-thirds for an override, though 11 Republicans were absent during the voting, the Star reports.

Lawmakers told the media the override will be a top priority when they return to the capitol Sept. 16.

“We’re confident the votes are there for an override,” House Majority Leader Mike Cierpiot told the news site, adding that the discussion centers in part on limited funding for the A+ Scholarships.

“It’d be different if the program had all the money it needed, but it does not,” he said. “So there are citizens who can’t get these scholarships. We shouldn’t be adding students to the program at this time.”

Immigration advocates, of course, disagree.

“They are going to continue to live and work in Missouri,” said Vanessa Crawford Aragon, executive director of Missouri Immigrant and Refugee Advocates. “It doesn’t make sense to hinder them from getting a college education.”