Last week, the Trump administration announced a regulation that could strip tax-exempt status from schools and universities that provide financial support specifically to Black and other minority students. The administration argues that scholarships intended to address the disenfranchisement of Black, Latino and other marginalized communities from accessing higher education are discriminatory against white and Asian students.

“The rules would deny tax-exempt status to any school, including secondary schools and universities, if it has any policy or program, including admissions and scholarships, that the I.R.S. finds to be racially discriminatory,” according to The New York Times in a piece detailing how the Treasury Department will serve as an enforcer in this new ruling.

As someone who is college-educated and also both Latino and Asian, I am hyper-aware of how absurd this rationale is. I also find it uncomfortable to watch President Donald Trump invoke minority groups I am a part of to dismantle programs that actually helped make my own education possible. By claiming to “protect” Asians, his administration is pitting minority communities against each other while purposefully ignoring the vastly different histories and barriers that shape our access to higher education.

The disparity in privilege within higher education among different minority groups did not happen by accident. For decades, parts of the U.S. immigration system favored highly educated workers, including many immigrants from East and South Asian countries. That helped produce some Asian American communities that were more familiar with higher education, prioritized academic achievement and had more resources to help their children navigate applications.

Of course, Asian Americans are not a monolith, and many — including refugees, working-class immigrants and Southeast Asian communities — face educational barriers that are often left out of the larger “Asians are good at school” narrative we all grew up hearing.

Latino migration has followed a totally different history. Many Latino families arrived through labor migration, displacement or economic necessity, often with fewer financial resources and less familiarity with the American education system. Treating the academic success of some recent Asian American groups as proof that helping Black or Latino students hurts them is not only misleading but also erases the enormous diversity that exists in the Asian American community.

And I don’t even need to delve into the vast and abundant forms of staunchly institutionalized racism that continue to follow Black students today. To claim that robbing these groups of aid that has been purposefully and greedily withheld since they were allowed to go to school alongside white kids is “discriminatory” is a joke too sinister to laugh at.

When I was applying to colleges, I was fortunate enough to earn scholarships and financial aid intended for Hispanic students to attend private universities in New York. Those programs did not give me an unfair advantage, nor did they compensate for a lack of qualifications. They helped offset disadvantages that had shaped my education for a long time. Case in point: I didn’t even speak or write in English until I was 7 years old, when my family migrated to Texas.

I eventually caught up (and then some), but after that, I had to learn how private university admissions and scholarship applications worked via the internet, other students at school, and teachers or parents of friends who were generous with their time and knowledge. No one in my family had ever attended university in the U.S.

I’m not suggesting that white American students never face challenges of having to figure things out on their own; of course, many do. The point is that immigrant, Black and other minority students are more likely to encounter those barriers early on because of longstanding structural inequalities and because the American higher education system was originally created by white Americans for white Americans. We can recognize this as fact and correct it.

Framing support for Black and Latino students as a direct assault on Asian Americans is dishonest and outright ignorant. It reduces Asian students to a monolithic political pawn. But educational access is not a zero-sum game, and Asian students do not become “more equal” when Black and Latino students lose resources.

What makes this rule particularly scary is that the administration is using the IRS, an institution that we all collectively fund, to pressure schools into abandoning programs designed to make education more accessible. There’s little doubt that if Trump is successful, universities will simply retain fewer Black and Hispanic students. And that’s everyone’s loss.