United States President Donald Trump signed a memorandum Tuesday that aims to prevent undocumented immigrants in the United States from being counted when Congressional constituencies are redrawn in the next round of redistricting.
Experts and attorneys for the US Census said the action would be legally dubious, which would likely benefit the Trump Republican Party by eliminating the largely non-white migrant population in the US without documentation.
Redistricting occurs both at the state level to draw maps for the state house legislatures and at the federal level to draw maps for United States Congressional districts. The latter are known as congressional distribution.
Proponents of citizen-only constituencies argue that each vote should have the same weight. If one district has far fewer eligible voters than another, they say, each vote has more influence on election results.
Democrats and immigrant rights activists say that including non-voters ensures that elected leaders represent all those who depend on public services like schools and garbage collection, regardless of eligibility to vote.
The note argues that it is necessary to remove undocumented immigrants from Congressional distribution maps to ensure that only legal US residents have a voice in federal politics.
“President Trump’s executive order on excluding illegal immigrants from the distribution base is another decisive step in fulfilling his solemn promise to ensure that only American citizens are represented in Congress, not illegal aliens,” a senior official told Reuters. administration official, who asked not to be identified.
“Excluding these illegal aliens from the distribution base is more in line with the principles of representative democracy that underpins our system of government,” the memo states.
Name one of the states where there are an estimated 2.2 million undocumented immigrants who make up more than six percent of the state’s population. Counting migrants “for the purpose of distributing them could result in the allocation of two or three more seats in Congress than would otherwise be allocated,” according to the memo.
But the move raises important legal questions and will likely lead to litigation.
The United States Supreme Court in June rejected President Donald Trump’s decision to terminate the DACA program that offers protections to 700,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. [Nicholas Kamm/AFP]
Citizen-only constituencies are viewed as potentially legal for statewide constituencies, but the United States Constitution explicitly says that the distribution of Congress must be based on the “total number of people” in each state. Multiple federal laws have reinforced that reading, and the United States Supreme Court has upheld that interpretation.
“All of this makes Trump’s position scandalous,” said Joshua Geltzer, a constitutional law expert and professor at Georgetown Law, adding that the measure will almost certainly face litigation.
Another question is how the Trump administration would obtain data on undocumented immigrants. The 2020 US Census does not ask respondents if they are citizens, legal or not.
In theory, officials could determine citizenship data through administrative records such as driver’s license databases, along with citizenship estimates collected in other Census Bureau surveys. But those data are incomplete, and demographers and immigration advocacy groups have argued that they are unreliable.
The government census count helps determine where taxpayers’ money is spent to build public facilities like schools, hospitals, and fire departments, as well as to calculate the distribution of states in the United States House of Representatives. The United States Constitution mandates that the United States count its population every 10 years.
Trump’s planned executive order could prove popular with the president’s base of support as he tries to generate enthusiasm for his re-election in November.
Trump has spent much of his presidency seeking to limit the number of migrants entering the U.S. illegally, particularly from Central America, and his executive order was another part of his immigration agenda.
It has long been a strategy of the Trump administration to use the census to identify and limit the political power of undocumented immigrants. But the efforts have faced obstacles.
In 2018, the administration said it would ask 2020 census respondents if they were citizens, a measure ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court.
After the defeat, Trump issued an executive order in July 2019 with the goal of determining citizenship status through a treasure trove of administrative records. The order, which asked states to turn over such data to the United States Census Bureau, still faces litigation from immigration advocates, including the Mexican-American Defense and Legal Education Fund.
A woman brings her belongings to a different part of the camp near the US ports of entry in Chamizal Park on December 19, 2019, in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In the mud and cold of a makeshift camp in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, more than 1,000 Mexican migrants had been waiting for weeks, some months, for the opportunity to apply for asylum in the United States. [Paul Ratje/ AFP]
SOURCE:
Al Jazeera and news agencies
.
