An executive order President Trump
Donald John Trump Pelosi says Trump’s decision to reverse the fair housing rule is a “betrayal of our nation’s founding values.” Trump says he would consider pardons for those involved in the Mueller investigation. Fauci says he and his family have experienced “serious threats” during the pandemic. MORE Issued this week to exclude undocumented immigrants from the official estimate of how many seats each state gets in Congress, it has raised questions about how the administration will adjust formal Census findings.
Few census experts expect Trump’s order to withstand legal scrutiny when it inevitably hits court. Several states and groups have already issued litigation threats, signaling a constitutional requirement that everyone be counted in the Decennial Census.
But beyond the legal questions, those same experts had a more fundamental query: How does the administration plan to count those in the country illegally?
It is unclear if there is any formal federal data set that covers undocumented workers. Last year, the Supreme Court blocked the administration from requiring the Census Bureau to ask whether the respondents were citizens. Other agencies legally track immigrants in the country, though experts say there is no official way to track how many are in the country without authorization, or where those people live.
“There is no method that they currently have to do what he wants them to do. So how do you implement your order, if it actually continues? That’s really the main question, ”said Kimball Brace, a census and redistricting expert who runs the consulting firm Election Data Services.
He noted that several external estimates have been published on the number of undocumented immigrants believed to be in the country, although these vary widely.
Trump’s executive order requires federal departments and agencies to share relevant information with the Census Bureau that could be used to help count the illegal foreign population, a White House spokesman said.
The executive order specifically directs the Citizenship and Immigration Services of the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Patrol, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Social Security Administration and two offices within the Department of State to provide data.
The White House spokesman said the Census Bureau has been collecting records, although the spokesperson declined to give details on what data sets could be used.
The office directed questions to the White House. A spokeswoman for the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, did not respond to a request for comment.
“How are you going to separate the illegal from the other citizens who are here legally? How are we going to obtain estimates of the illegal population? So I find this data collection very challenging, ”said Michael McDonald, political scientist and census expert at the University of Florida. “I think it is not an initiator just because the data will not be available.”
It is also difficult to obtain mere estimates of the undocumented population, a fact recognized by Trump’s own executive order. He cites a 2018 study by Yale University researchers who estimated that between 16.2 million and 29.5 million people were illegally in the United States, figures that are much higher than other studies. A 2016 Pew Research Center study estimated that the undocumented population was 10.7 million.
Playing with official Census Bureau numbers by eliminating an estimated number of undocumented immigrants would almost certainly change the seat allocation in the U.S. House of Representatives.
States like California and Texas, which host 2.2 million and 1.6 million undocumented immigrants respectively, according to Pew’s figures, would lose multiple seats in Congress. The undocumented population in Florida and New York is also larger than the typical Congressional district.
However, other states are likely to benefit, such as Alabama, West Virginia, and Rhode Island, and all are projected to lose a seat in the next redistribution process. Those states have small undocumented populations, which means they would lose proportionally smaller fractions of their population.
The idea of excluding undocumented immigrants from the count stemmed from a lawsuit filed two years ago by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (R). Marshall’s lawsuit alleged that counting undocumented immigrants would cost Alabamians their right to equal representation.
Marshall praised Trump’s order when it was issued Tuesday.
“When the seats in the Congress of the states and the votes of the Electoral College are divided, the representation must be based on those persons who reside in their states and in this country legally. A contrary result would rob the State of Alabama and its legal residents of their legitimate share of representation and undermine the rule of law, ”said Marshall. “The state of Alabama is among several states that could lose a seat in the United States House of Representatives if illegal aliens are counted for distribution in the 2020 Census.”
Some states have small margins to determine their number of seats in Congress, which means that any effort to manipulate Census data could result in a displaced allocation. Brace’s latest estimates show that Florida will earn its 29th place, the second to win this redistricting cycle, by a margin of just 44,285 residents. Alabama, by contrast, would drop from seven seats to six by a margin of just 10,072 residents.
Illinois, New York, Texas and Montana appear to occupy the last congressional seats at stake, according to probable estimates by the Department of Commerce. Minnesota, Ohio, California and Rhode Island fail to retain their current total number of seats.
“We know the states that are at the top, and they are likely to be more affected than not,” said Brace.
But those preliminary figures won’t be finalized until the Census Bureau reports its final counts.
And, in an ironic twist, the coronavirus pandemic may ease Alabama’s complaint in the first place: Brace said new population estimates by data giant ESRI show that Florida’s population growth has slowed enough so that it no longer collects a 29th district, and that Alabama would maintain its seventh district.
Within states, Trump’s plan would greatly complicate the redistricting process. In a state like California, where the majority of the undocumented population lives in Los Angeles County, allocating fewer seats would mean larger congressional districts, leading to less representation for every region of the state, from the Los Angeles Democrat. Angels to the Inner Republican Empire.
Trump’s plan would surely create a legal challenge for states that would lose votes in the House. That is unprecedented: a federal court ruled in 1998 against an effort by the Clinton administration to use sampling to obtain a different count in the 2000 cycle.
Even if the courts upheld Trump’s order, there is no guarantee that Congress, especially one under Democratic control, will ratify the Census Bureau figures.
“Even if the Trump administration presented the numbers to Congress, they don’t have to accept them,” McDonald said.
– Brett Samuels and Rafael Bernal contributed to this report.
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