Here's How You Can Challenge Wage Garnishment for Defaulted Student Loans

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https://truthout.org/articles/heres-how-you-can-challenge-wage-garnishment-for-defaulted-student-loans/

Here’s How You Can Challenge Wage Garnishment for Defaulted Student Loans

The Trump administration announced that this week it will start forcibly collecting money from student loan debtors.

By Braxton Brewington , TRUTHOUT
Published January 10, 2026
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Cancellation programs like Total and Permanent Disability, False Certification, and Borrower Defense can provide relief for millions of borrowers who deserve it because their university cheated them or closed down while they were enrolled. Another little-known option that borrowers have is to apply for a hardship exemption if wage garnishment causes them financial hardship. While temporary, and certainly not a solution to the student debt crisis, debtors can apply to pause or reduce forced collections if they are in difficult circumstances.

There is a solid chance
debtors are in default because of an error caused by their student loan servicer. Servicers, the middle-men of the student debt system, have gross financial incentives to steer borrowers into the wrong payment plan. As borrower balances get transferred from one servicer to another, and as payments and documents and interest accumulates, errors occur. Many borrowers are told the wrong balance, estimated for the wrong payment and told that years of payments don’t exist. Though rarely granted by the Department of Education, debtors in forbearance of deferment who went into default due to a loan servicer error can challenge the default status and have it reversed.

Some borrowers — such as those who are incarcerated or facing unique circumstances — could also appeal to the Department of Education and request a “compromise” or “write-off” of student loans to prevent administrative wage garnishment.

It’s not just borrowers who should be making noise about the affront that is wage garnishment for student loans. Labor unions should be fighting tooth and nail to ensure that employers protect their workers from illegal forced collections. The more extraction from student debtors, the more there is a drag on our economy — making it harder for businesses to thrive, homes to be purchased, or families to be started.

Student debtors would be wise to fight back at every opportunity, urging the federal government to negotiate student debt on different terms. The Department of Education isn’t just our creditor expecting payments, it is also a democratically elected body that is susceptible to political power from below. To accept the terms and conditions of harsh debt collection is to succumb to a broken system run by unqualified billionaires. To fight back against our debts, as Trump put it, is “a smart thing, not a stupid thing.”

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1. See also the Strike Debt's "Debt Resistor's Operations Manual"

Read online or buy a copy here: https://strikedebt.org/drom/

The Strike Debt group (f.k.a. The Debt Collective) first arose in the Occupy Wall St. camps (along with groups working on other topics). One of their first programs was to buy up student and medical debt for pennies on the dollar and then discharge it using donated funds; in this way, as of the last time I checked ca. 2021, the group had managed to cancel $31,982,455.76 of medical and student debt.

(This illustrates one of great advantages of in-person gatherings of people with varied backgrounds, interests, and abilities: they discover they have important concerns in common with others they might never otherwise have connected with, and can more quickly and easily organize to act on them.)