WASHINGTON – President Trump on Tuesday ordered the federal government not to count undocumented immigrants by allocating the nation’s House of Representatives districts, a move critics called a transparent political tactic to help Republicans in violation of the Constitution.
The president’s directive would exclude millions of people in determining how many House seats each state should have based on the census once a decade, reversing the long-standing policy of counting everyone regardless of citizenship or legal status. The effect would likely shift several seats from Democratic states to Republican states.
“There used to be a time when you could proudly declare ‘I am a citizen of the United States,'” Trump said in a written statement after signing a memorandum to the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau. “But now, the radical left is trying to erase the existence of this concept and hide the number of illegal aliens in our country. This is all part of a broader left-wing effort to erode the rights of American citizens, and I will not tolerate it. ”
The action directly conflicts with the traditional consensus interpretation of the Constitution and will almost certainly be challenged in court, which could delay its effect if it does not block its enactment entirely. But it fits into Trump’s efforts to curb legal and illegal immigration at a time when he eagerly tries to galvanize his political base in a fall election season that follows his Democratic opponent.
“I think Donald Trump’s point of view is: ‘I may appear to be trying to do something by stoking anti-immigrant fervor, and if I lose in court, then I also stoke anti-cut fervor,'” Joshua A. Geltzer, director from the Georgetown Institute for Constitutional Defense and Protection, he said in an interview. “It should be legally impossible and, in fact, difficult to do.”
As a practical matter, Mr. Trump’s order could not be carried out even if it was legal, because there is no official count of undocumented immigrants, and federal law prohibits the use of population estimates for re-distribution purposes..
The move comes a year after the Supreme Court blocked Trump from adding a citizenship question to the census on the grounds that his apparent reasoning “appears to have been made up.” The administration has since been trying to collect information on undocumented immigrants through separate means, such as driver’s license files.
A study last year by the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports limits on immigration, found that excluding immigrants from the count for the purpose of attracting congressional districts would take seats from some states and give more to others. .
Excluding unauthorized immigrants in 2020 would redistribute three seats, according to the study, with California, New York, and Texas losing one seat they otherwise would have had, while Ohio, Alabama, and Minnesota would win one. The study found even more radical effects if the children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States were excluded, but the president’s directive did not mention them.
Steven Camarota, the center’s director of research, said the administration’s effort would be administratively difficult and likely linked to the courts. “However,” he said, “the President has done the country an important service by reminding us that tolerating large-scale illegal immigration creates a number of unavoidable consequences, including diluting the political representation of American citizens in Congress and the Electoral College “.
The White House separately asked congressional appropriators last weekend to include $ 1 billion in the next coronavirus relief package for the purpose of conducting a “timely census.” The Census Bureau had previously requested permission to extend the count of the hardest people to count until October and delay the delivery of population redistribution totals until next year.
The $ 1 billion could allow the office to drop that plan and speed up the count to deliver a redistribution count to Congress in December, before Trump leaves office if he loses the election to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. mean that less time is spent counting marginalized people than in a normal census, which experts believe would benefit Republicans.
Tuesday’s president’s directive was the latest effort in his election year to restrict immigration and immigration rights in the United States, recently based on the need to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
The administration last month decided to suspend new work visas and ban hundreds of thousands of foreigners from seeking employment in the United States, prompting immediate opposition from business leaders and several states.
But last week, administration officials pulled out of a separate plan to strip their international college students of their visas if they didn’t attend at least some classes in person. Earlier this month, Trump told Telemundo that he would sign a “much larger immigration bill” through an executive order, although that has not materialized.
The president’s decision to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the congressional distribution is a long history. Even when he signed his memorandum on Tuesday, the Census Bureau’s own website continued to say in a question-and-answer section that undocumented residents should be counted: “Yes, all people (citizens and non-citizens) with a habitual residence in all 50 states will be included in the census and therefore in distribution counts. “
The president’s policy seemed to be at odds with the Constitution, which requires the government to do a “royal enumeration” of all people living in the United States without distinguishing whether they are citizens. But the memorandum signed by Trump argued that the government has always made distinctions such as not counting foreign diplomats or temporary visitors even though they are physically in the United States. Therefore, according to the memorandum, the government can make the additional distinction of not counting people who have no legal right to be in the country in the first place.
The argument that immigrants can be excluded from cast accounts also runs counter to legal opinions issued by the Justice Department during the administrations of Presidents George HW Bush and Bill Clinton, when some in Congress attempted to put that exclusion in law.
Critics said the administration’s efforts to first include a citizenship issue and now to ignore the cast of undocumented immigrants would lead to a low count, including of legal non-citizens and minority residents, resulting in less representation and federal funding. In the areas where they live, Democrats tend to vote.
Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the Immigrant Justice Fund of the National Center for Immigration Law, said that regardless of whether Mr. Trump’s latest action was legal, it would discourage compliance with the census among Latinos, who are already completing the rate survey. shorter than people of other races
“This is his favorite move every time he feels cornered or feels like he’s losing,” Hincapié said. “He uses immigrants and immigration to divide and distract himself, and at the same time send that chilling effect to all the immigrant communities that have already lived in fear under his administration.”
Michael Wines contributed reporting.
