Documents obtained by NPR shed new light on a bitter fight between defrauded student borrowers and U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. These borrowers — more than 200,000 of them — say some for-profit colleges lied to them about their job prospects and the transferability of credits. They argue they were defrauded and that the Education Department should erase their federal student loan debt under a rule called "borrower defense."

Thousands of students who took out federal loans to attend schools that lured them with fraudulent claims will still have to repay a portion of their debts, the Education Department said Tuesday — a new attempt to water down a loan-forgiveness program that the department’s leader has long deplored.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is doubling down on a controversial policy of granting partial debt relief to students defrauded by their colleges, despite ongoing legal challenges and a congressional inquiry. On Tuesday, the Education Department released an updated methodology for processing loan forgiveness claims made under a statute known as borrower defense to repayment.

Students who are cheated by their colleges will receive full loan forgiveness only if they end up earning far less than their peers, while others will receive relief between 25% and 75% of their debt under new rules unveiled Tuesday by the U.S. Education Department.

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos took another crack at revamping a student loan forgiveness program Tuesday, affecting thousands of students who took out federal loans to attend for-profit colleges that solicited attendance with fraudulent claims.

In October, after the Trump administration initially said it erroneously collected on the loans of some 16,000 Corinthian borrowers, a federal judge held DeVos in contempt of court and imposed a $100,000 fine for violating an order to stop collecting on student loans from the defunct for-profit college. Now, according to the department, that means a total of 45,801 borrowers “were erroneously taken out of forbearance or stopped collections status.” That includes the roughly 29,000 newly identified borrowers, plus the original 16,034 borrowers. “FSA has now placed all 45,801 borrowers in the correct status,” the government’s court filing said.

The Education Department revealed in a court filing this week that it identified an additional 29,000 former Corinthian Colleges students who were pursued for federal student loan payments despite a court order barring collection.

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos forced more than 45,000 defrauded students to repay loans in violation of a court order – far more than the 16,000 originally estimated, the department revealed in a court filing Tuesday.