A federal judge today, for the second time in just a few weeks, rebuked the Department of Education for its wrongful and illegal continued attempts to collect on the debt of students who were defrauded by the for profit Corinthian Colleges, ruling that the Department must stop collecting on the loans of tens of thousands of Corinthian students in light of the Department’s use of an illegal rule to reduce relief to borrowers by 80 percent.

Two court hearings are scheduled for next week in key cases that assert the rights of federal student loan borrowers who were cheated by the for-profit colleges Corinthian and ITT Tech. The hearing in San Francisco on Monday, June 11 involves the Department of Education’s continued refusal to grant complete loan cancellation to former students of for-profit Corinthian Colleges.

A court hearing is scheduled for Monday, June 4th involving the Department of Education’s continued refusal to grant full and complete loan cancellation to former Corinthian College students who were cheated by the for-profit college. This hearing in the case of Calvillo Manriquez v. DeVos follows last week’s groundbreaking decision in the case, in which a judge granted a preliminary injunction stopping the Department of Education from applying its “average earnings rule” to cheated former students of Corinthian Colleges, and preventing the Department from further collecting on the plaintiffs’ loans.

In a landmark decision for defrauded students of Corinthian Colleges, a U.S. District judge late Friday stopped the Department of Education from applying its “average earnings rule” to cheated former students of Corinthian Colleges, and prevented the Department from collecting on the plaintiffs’ loans. The ruling enjoins the Department of Education from using its partial relief scheme, which it has been applying to partially deny thousands of borrowers’ applications for loan relief, because that scheme clearly violates the Privacy Act and causes severe and irreparable injury to borrowers.

A court filing over the weekend revealed that the U.S. Department of Education secretly, illegally, and unconstitutionally used Social Security data to deny loan discharges to students cheated by Corinthian Colleges, Inc.