What does the Debt Collective recommend we do regarding our Borrower’s Defense application denials not that we are to have a new Biden administration. According to the information I was sent my loan repayments will kick in again in January - before the inauguration.
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Hey there,
If your student loans are set to repayment before inauguration, I would highly recommend contacting your loan servicers and work with them to put your loans on a temporary forbearance. We should have word fairly soon on a plan for this.
I certainly do think that this election is fairly over, but another hurdle is that the election results have to be certified. I am fairly confident that it would swing in Biden’s direction.
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Hi @Kirstie_Wilson,
We’re going to do some more research and ask some more experts before we give any formal plan of action. There is a lot that we don’t know right now.
For the time being I think @Joseph_White has the right idea. Maybe take a wait and see approach in November until we have a little bit more information about what plans might be in place from a Biden admin to address the gap in the moratorium, but if nothing promising emerges in Dec. make a call to your servicer and work out a temporary option to keep things on pause for Jan. For most people this will be a temporary forbearance, but their may be other ways to accomplish the same goal.
We still don’t have confirmation from team Biden that they will extend the moratorium, but they really should. That is the very least they should do. But they should do much more than that. Biden has the authority to cancel all federal student debt. He should use that authority.
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Does anyone know if the judge who handled the Sweet vs Devos case plans to put an order in to stop her from denying anymore claims until the court proceedings are done? He mentioned that he was considering it before. Now would be the time to enact it if so. It seems like Trump is cleaning house on his way out. He fired the Secretary of Defense Esper today, and it looks like the CIA director Gina is next. I’m afraid that Devos might start acting similarly during her last 2 months out of spite, and will deny the remaining DTRs and rollback even more student loan protections just to give the middle finger.
I know this is under consideration but I don’t know if a decision has been made. I do think it is a reasonable move for the court to make, and I hope they do.
As an update to this, it looks like the DoE has reinstated administrative forbearance for the people who had their Borrowers Defense denied.
I got an email about a decision being made and when I checked the message, it said the forbearance was effective until Dec 31, 2025. That definitely put a smile on my face first thing this morning!
Here’s an update post regarding this from the Project on Predatory Student Lending website: https://predatorystudentlending.org/news/blog/update-department-of-education-stops-borrower-defense-denials-reinstates-forbearance/
The DoE has also voluntarily stopped additional denials to stop the court from ordering an injunction.
So, awesome news! Still lots more work to be done, but this at least gives us some reprieve while this battle is fought in the courts and hopefully dealt with by the new administration.
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Hi @melissa,
Thank you so much for posting this. This is great news.
While we still won’t know what the outcome of this case will be for quite some time, this does effectively put a fork in Betsy DeVos’s attempt to deny people the debt discharges they deserve. She tried and failed. Although she did effectively delay justice for many people for four years.
Now the fight continues and we won’t stop until everyone gets their debts cancelled! In the meantime it is nice to know they won’t be collected on.
If anyone who got a DTR denial does continue to get collected on, or is told they have to restart payments, please reach out to me ASAP. We will look into it and put a stop to it.
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Hi Thomas since we’re about a month and a half since the election has there been any updates that you are aware of? I know the loan payments don’t restart yet. Should we resubmit a BD application if our prior one was denied or wait until Biden is in office?
At the moment I don’t think there is any reason to submit a new BD application if you have previously submitted one.
We don’t know exactly what the Biden administration will do, but the general expectation is that they will reexamine the entire BD program & the claims that were denied or granted only partial discharge and make different decisions.
We’ll have to wait and see. At some point, depending on how this all develops, it might make sense to file a new BD application. But we just don’t know that yet.
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Soooo, we are about a year later now, and we know what the Biden admin did. Nothing. My application was denied. I never tried to reply back with a response as I got the generic response that I did not state a legal case. I am not an attorney.
Yep. It is infuriating.
The only info I have is from here. It seems like people who got denied should be filing a request for reconsideration to avoid getting their accounts placed back into repayment on Feb. 1. I’ve got a meeting with some lawyers on Friday where I want to ask them if that is their understanding too.
https://studentaid.gov/announcements-events/borrower-defense-update
Hi Thomas, I am new here but stumbled on this thread first thing. I share the same thing with ReaChrist1 in that I was denied for lack of evidence. The FBI raided Itt tech while I was a student. They have the evidence of fraud. Do I need to get a lawyer to move forward with my request for reconsideration? The school was shut for fraud what more evidence do they need? Thanks for your time.