The sprawling case, centered on students defrauded by for-profit schools, has now become the largest class-action settlement in American history.

Hundreds of thousands of student loan borrowers have gotten their debts forgiven, or soon will, due to a $23 billion class-action settlement with the U.S. Department of Education.

The student loan borrower plaintiffs said that their schools significantly misled them and that the Trump administration delayed delivering the relief to which they were entitled under a protection known as Borrower Defense. That program allows defrauded federal student borrowers to get their debt excused.

The long legal battle to erase the debts of nearly half a million federal student loan borrowers who say they were defrauded by their colleges is finally coming to an end, after a recent court ruling in a lawsuit that has spanned three presidential administrations.

The class-action suit, originally filed against the first Trump administration seven years ago, centered on a federal rule known as borrower defense. The rule is supposed to allow borrowers to petition the U.S. Education Department to erase their debts if a school has lied to them — about things like their job prospects, their credits' transferability or their likely salary after graduation.

Student-loan forgiveness is finally here for thousands of borrowers.

A federal court denied the Department of Education's request to delay student-debt relief for borrowers entitled to relief under the Sweet vs. McMahon settlement. The settlement has allowed for $23 billion in relief for over 500,000 borrowers defrauded by their schools.

The Education Department must proceed with discharging student loan forgiveness for a group of eligible borrowers in a settlement case after a recent ruling from a federal appeals court.

The Friday decision marked a win for about 179,000 borrowers in the drawn-out Sweet v. McMahon settlement. In the ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected an appeal from the Department of Education to alter the initial settlement timeline since they hadn't expected a large amount of applications for loan relief. The borrowers applied in a five-month window stretching from June to Nov. 2022.

The decision is just the latest in the Sweet v. McMahon case, which was originally filed in 2019 under the first Trump administration. At the time, borrowers alleged that the Education Department was stonewalling their applications for borrower defense.

As of this April, the Education Department had discharged or refunded $12 billion for almost 300,000 borrowers under the settlement, the agency said in recent court documents.

A new lawsuit alleges the U.S. Department of Education may not be discharging certain federal student loans as previously promised.

The lawsuit, filed by the Project on Predatory Student Lending, seeks data showing which loans have actually received discharges.