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Kristopher Cabreira was looking forward to the relief that $10,000 in student loan forgiveness would bring. After President Joe Biden announced $10,000 in student debt relief for federal borrowers making less than $125,000 a year in late August, Cabreira, 46, immediately began thinking about what that $43,000 reduction would mean. It could pay off his debt faster with lower monthly payments and could even give him the flexibility to help his parents financially. “I was ecstatic,” Cabreira told Insider. “I looked at it right away to see if I qualified and I did.” However, a decision made by the Ministry of Education on September 29, dashed all his plans. Cabreira student loans are federal loans administered by private banks under the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program. While borrowers with these loans initially had the option to consolidate their debt into the Federal Direct Loan, the September guidance stated that after that date, FFEL borrowers cannot consolidate and therefore will not be eligible for the one-time relief biden’s student debt. Cabreira said he wasn’t immediately aware of the reversal, but found out a few days later when he called his student loan company to confirm he still qualified and was told he didn’t qualify for debt relief. “All of a sudden, he pulled away,” Cabreira said. “It could have been $10,000 that I didn’t have to pay, and now that’s gone.” He is one of 770,000 borrowers affected by that decision, according to an administration official, and while the Department of Education has said it will continue to look for other ways to help this group of FFEL borrowers, it adds to the history of FFEL borrowers being disqualified from federal benefits just because they took out loans at the wrong time — before Congress officially shut down the program in 2010. “I feel stuck,” Cabreira said. “There’s no continuity for us. All we hear is ‘well, we’re working on it’. They should be doing more.”

A lawsuit brought by 6 GOP states led to the reversal

Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan has come under fire from conservative groups, and in late September, six Republican-led states filed a lawsuit arguing that the debt relief would hurt their states’ tax revenues — along with banks that could afford profit from FFEL loans. That’s why the Department of Education quietly implemented the rollback to the FFEL guidelines the same day the lawsuit was filed, effectively undermining a key argument for the Republican defense. But even without being able to use the lost revenue from the FFEL program in their case, the same group is now responsible for the temporary stay the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has placed on Biden’s debt relief — meaning that here and there As of two weeks, the department is barred from actually paying off any student loans until the court makes a final decision on the legality of the policy. While that brings uncertainty to the millions of federal borrowers who have already applied for relief, FFEL borrowers who didn’t consolidate their loans before Sept. 29 are left with an even bleaker path forward. “Our goal is to provide relief to as many eligible borrowers as quickly and easily as possible, and this will allow us to achieve that goal while we continue to explore additional legally available options to provide relief to borrowers with FFEL and home equity loans. Perkins loans,” the Department of Education said in a statement at the time. One FFEL borrower even took legal action — on Oct. 10, the Job Creators Network Foundation’s Legal Action Fund filed a lawsuit seeking to block Biden’s debt relief on behalf of two borrowers, one of whom has FFEL loans and is ineligible for relief. The complaint said the borrower believed it was “unreasonable, arbitrary and unfair to foreclose on her.”

“When will help really come?”

Nearly five million borrowers still have FFEL loans they took out decades ago. While the Biden administration said the reversal affects only a small group of those borrowers because the majority of them either consolidated before the reversal or also have direct loans, its impact is still significant. Currently, Cabreira’s financial future is uncertain, earning a five-figure income at a vision insurance company in California. Career-wise, he’s not quite where he thought he’d be due to job losses that derailed him during the 2008 recession. While he’s glad he pursued his master’s in business, he said he’s “upset” that he ended up in the FFEL program, which was the only way to finance his education. “There has been no response from the Department of Education, the White House or even any Democrats,” Cabreira said. “All they say is, ‘oh yeah, we’re so sorry this happened to you. We’re going to fix it. So, how are you going to get it right? When are you going to get it right? When is the help going to come? And of course, the Republicans are making it difficult for us who need it and want it.”