This story has been updated to include comment from the Department of Education.

A group of consumer advocates filed a lawsuit against the Department of Education (ED) for revising an Obama-era rule that was designed to protect students who were defrauded by predatory schools.

The group is challenging the department’s revised rule on borrower defense, calling it “fatally-flawed” and “grounded on the false premise that student borrowers are the bad actors.”

The lawsuit was filed by the Project on Predatory Lending and Public Citizen Litigation Group on behalf of the New York Legal Assistance Group, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

“This devastating rule goes above and beyond the department’s other significant efforts to deny defrauded students loan relief,” Project on Predatory Student Lending Director Toby Merrill said in a press release. “It imposes impossible standards for defrauded students seeking to assert their legal rights to loan cancellation, and relies on explanations that defy logic and rest on no evidence. There is no question this rule is illegal and will not stand up in court.”

In response to the lawsuit, ED Press Secretary Angela Morabito told Yahoo Finance in a statement that the “Department will vigorously defend its regulation, which gives students and borrowers the relief that they’re owed, restores fairness and due process, extends the period for closed school discharges, and saves the taxpayers up to $11.1 billion over ten years.”

‘Arbitrary and capricious’

Under existing federal law, borrowers with federal loans are eligible for loan forgiveness if a college or a university has misled them or engaged in other misconduct in violation of certain state laws. The department has faced an onslaught of these claims, in the wake of the for-profit giant Corinthian Colleges shutting down in 2015.

According to the lawsuit, the department made changes in 2016 to “protect student borrowers and federal taxpayers by strengthening mechanisms for borrowers who were misled, deceived, and defrauded by their schools to obtain relief from federal student loans and disincentivizing schools’ financially risky and misleading practices.”

But in 2017, the department under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos delayed implementation of the 2016 rule three times, the lawsuit asserted, and proceeded to ignore it as “current law.” A federal court had then stated that the department’s delaying of that 2016 rule was “unlawful because the delays were procedurally flawed and arbitrary and capricious.”