A coalition of 20 states and 15 cities and counties filed a lawsuit on Friday to block President Donald Trump’s memorandum directing that undocumented immigrants be excluded from the 2020 census count in order to decide how many members of Congress are distributed to each state, calling it “illegal”.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in New York, alleges that the Trump directive shows “a blatant disregard for an unequivocal constitutional mandate”: the Amendment 14 directive that “Representatives will be distributed among the various states according to their respective numbers, counting the total number of people in each state. “
“For 150 years, since the United States recognized the personalities of all those who were previously bound to slavery, every executive officer, every cabinet officer, has respected the unequivocal requirement that everyone be counted for distribution purposes, regardless of their immigration status, each president. Until now, “the lawsuit said.
Trump’s memorandum, signed earlier this week, said it will be “the policy of the United States to exclude aliens who are not in a legal immigration status under the Immigration and Nationality Act from the distribution base.”
Directs Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the census, to provide the president with data on the number of undocumented people so that when census officials present Trump with the final count, he can exclude them from the population totals used to determine how many seats of the House will have each state.
The lawsuit questions how the directive could be feasibly carried out, pointing out that the administration “cannot reliably exclude undocumented immigrants from the distribution count” because there are no accurate estimates of the undocumented population by state. Any effort to remove undocumented immigrants from the census using unreliable data is “arbitrary and capricious” and violates the Administrative Procedure Law, according to the lawsuit.
If Trump’s move is successful, it could have a big impact on states with large numbers of undocumented residents, such as New York and California. A lower census population count would mean fewer seats in Congress and potentially less federal dollars, too, the lawsuit said.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the president’s proclamation “the latest in a long list of anti-immigrant actions.”
“Nobody stops being a person because they lack documentation, that’s why we filed this lawsuit,” said James.
Another plaintiff in the case, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, called Trump’s actions “a clear violation of the United States Constitution and a blatant attempt to politicize a nonpartisan process by attacking certain groups of people and move forward on a biased agenda. “
The lawsuit seeks an order declaring the president’s proclamation illegal.
The Justice Department, which would defend the case in court, did not immediately respond to an email for comment.
The administration tried last year to add a citizenship question to the census for the first time in 60 years, but the United States Supreme Court blocked the measure.
