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The Donald Trump administration hopes that the highest court will give it an expeditious victory and thus prevent the case from escalating into a long judicial saga, a few weeks before Democrat Joe Biden enters the White House.
The Donald Trump administration’s battle to exclude the undocumented from the census count, which determines the electoral map in the United States, ran into resistance on Monday in the Supreme Court, where conservatives are in the majority. During the hearing, several judges showed resistance to Trump’s plan, but it was not clear if they can choose to block it or if they are going to let him advance with this proposal that can change the electoral map in the country.
One of the main obstacles that Trump’s argument faced was the uncertainty about the method that the government will use to calculate the number of undocumented and the delays in the delivery of the census results, which most likely will not be delivered on December 31, as it should be.
With the census already concluded, the president of the Supreme Court, John Robert, stated that “it is not known how many foreigners will be excluded and what the effect will be on the distribution of seats.”
See more: Undocumented in the US: 21st Century Slaves?
The directive issued by Trump in July met with resistance in the courts of several states, led by New York, in addition to other local administrations and groups in defense of human rights.
And several lower-ranking courts ruled that the president does not have the power to adjust the results of the census, subtracting the number of irregular migrants.
The representative of the government before the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Wall, admitted that he does not have a formula to calculate how many people can be excluded and in what categories, noting, for example, that immigrants who are in detention could be subtracted. “We don’t know what is feasible,” Wall said.
“You cannot declare that they are not here.”
New York State Delegate Barbara Underwood said during the hearing that “the government can do many things to induce undocumented immigrants to leave, but it cannot declare that they are not here.”
The Trump administration seeks to divide the census count to distinguish between the total population and the number of people who reside legally. To carry out this calculation, the government indicated that it can use data from other agencies, since the Supreme Court has already blocked an attempt by Trump to include a question about nationality in the survey.
The current system grants states like California and Texas, with large immigrant populations, additional seats in the House of Representatives.
According to the consulting firm Pew, in the United States there are about 10.5 million undocumented migrants, and a change of this type could have important consequences for California, Florida and Texas from the next elections.
How many foreigners are going to be excluded?
For Dal Ho, the director of the voting rights project of the influential civil rights organization American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) argued that the exclusion of the undocumented goes against tradition.
“For 230 years, since the founding days, states have always awarded House seats based on the number of people in each state regardless of their immigration status,” Ho said.
The three progressive justices and also Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, appointed by Trump this year, seemed sensitive to this argument. “If a person who has been in the country, let’s say 20 years, even illegally, why wouldn’t that person have an established residence here?” Coney Barrett said.
In their questions to the government representative, the judges suggested that a change in the ruling precedent is difficult to implement. “We don’t know what the Commerce Department is going to do, what the president is going to do, how many foreigners are going to be excluded and the effect” in Congress, said the head of the Court, John Roberts.
However, if the Court waits, Trump may be favored, since he may have the free way to act without limitations before the coming to power of Biden, on January 20.
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