ORLANDO, Fla. – If President Donald Trump manages to get immigrants in the country illegally excluded from being counted in the restructuring of the U.S. House of Representatives districts, California, Florida and Texas, he would end up with one seat less in Congress than if each resident were counted, according to an analysis by a group of experts.
Without that population, California would lose two seats instead of one, Florida would win one seat instead of two, and Texas would win two seats instead of three, according to the Pew Research Center analysis.
Additionally, Pew’s analysis shows that Alabama, Minnesota, and Ohio would each hold one seat in Congress that they likely would have lost during the process of dividing seats in Congress by the state known as distribution, which takes place after the Office from the US Census – counting the decade of every resident of the United States. The office is currently in the middle of the 2020 census.
Federal law requires the Census Bureau to turn over the final count numbers used for distribution to the president by the end of the year, but the office is asking Congress for an extension until April 30 due to disruptions caused by the pandemic.
In addition to being used to distribute Congressional seats, the results of the 2020 census will help determine how many votes in the Electoral College each state gets and the distribution of $ 1.5 trillion in federal funds.
Every resident of a state is traditionally counted during the cast, but last Tuesday Trump issued a directive seeking to ban people in the US illegally from being included in the template as Congressional districts are redrawn. . Trump said including them in the count “would create perverse incentives and undermine our system of government.”
At least four lawsuits or notices of a legal challenge have been filed to stop the directive. Some opponents say it is an effort to suppress the growing political power of Latinos in the United States and to discriminate against immigrant communities of color. The lawsuits say that there is no reliable method of counting people in the United States illegally and that order will decrease the accuracy of the census.
The president’s directive breaks with nearly 250 years of tradition and is unconstitutional, according to a lawsuit filed by Common Cause, the city of Atlanta and others in federal court in the District of Columbia. Other challenges have been raised or are in the process of being raised by the ACLU on behalf of immigrant rights groups, a coalition of states led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, and civil rights groups that have already sued the Trump administration for an effort to collect citizenship data. through administrative records.
Trump issued the order to collect citizenship data from US residents through administrative records last year after the US Supreme Court blocked his administration’s efforts to add a citizenship question to the form. from the 2020 census. Opponents said a citizenship question would have discouraged participation in the nation’s count, not only by people living illegally in the country but also by citizens who fear participation will expose family members. non-citizens to repercussions.
The Democrats-led House Oversight and Reform Committee is asking Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham, and other officials to testify about the Republican president’s directive at a hearing on next Wednesday.
During a virtual press conference on Saturday, the chair of the House committee, US Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York, called the order “blatantly unconstitutional and illegal.”
“Congress is empowered to determine how the census is conducted, not the president,” said Maloney.
