On Thursday, a federal court rejected President Trump’s order to exclude undocumented immigrants from the 2020 census.
What We Know:
- The court, a three-judge panel in Federal District Court in Manhattan, voted unanimously that President Trump lacked the authority to remove noncitizens from census counts which will be used next year to reallocate seats in the House of Representatives. They ruled that it was illegal and therefore a lawsuit challenging the order did not need to go to a trial, saying that Trump’s proposal exceeded his authority under federal laws governing the census and reapportionment. They also said it violated the Constitution’s requirement to base apportionment of the House on “the whole number of persons in each state”.
- The case involved lawsuits brought by two sets of plaintiffs, one a group of state and local governments and the United States Conference of Mayors, and the second a coalition of advocacy groups and other nongovernmental organizations. Both groups argued that Trump’s order would cause some of them to lose representation in the House as well as damage all of them by leading to a less accurate census.
- Since the first census, taken in 1790, the number of seats each state holds in the House of Representatives has been based on counts of everyone living in the United States regardless of citizenship or legal status, except in the nation’s early year’s when those left out included slaves and “Indians not taxed”. Trump’s order attempted to scrap this practice. In a memorandum in July, Trump told the Commerce Department that the Census Bureau should produce two population count, one that was the traditional census produced every decade and another that estimated the number of unauthorized immigrants living in each state.
- By subtracting immigrant populations from state totals, it would exclude millions of people and cause a drastic shift in House seats. In states with large immigrant populations, like California or Texas, it would largely reduce the number of House seats allotted to them and redistribute those seats to states with few unauthorized immigrants, like Alabama.
- “This is a huge victory for voting rights and for immigrants’ rights,” Dale Ho, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union representing the groups that brought one of the lawsuits, said in a statement. “President Trump has tried and failed yet again to weaponize the census against immigrant communities. The law is clear — every person counts in the census.”
- The court ruled the president’s order excluding unauthorized immigrants violated the law “in two clear respects.” The court said federal law required “the production of a single set of state population totals,” making the two separate counts requested by Trump illegal. Additionally, the judges wrote, it “violates the statute governing reapportionment because, so long as they reside in the United States, illegal aliens qualify as ‘persons’ in a ‘state’ as Congress used those words.”
It is not currently unclear whether this ruling will affect a second case that is tied to Trump’s order: a battle over the administration’s demand last month that ordered the population count to be cut short so the original deadline could be met despite delays in the process due to the coronavirus pandemic.
