Trump’s move to exclude some immigrants from census could affect seats in Congress
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump on Tuesday directed his administration to exclude immigrants who are in the United States illegally when calculating how many seats in Congress each state gets after the current census, a decision that critics denounced as unconstitutional and one that will likely face a swift court challenge.
The president’s directive, which would adopt a practice never before used in U.S. history, faces several major hurdles – legal, logistical and political.
If successfully carried out, however, it could have far-reaching effects by reducing the political clout of states with significant numbers of immigrants, including California and Texas. It could also shift power toward whiter, more rural areas of states at the expense of more diverse cities.
The move also provided the latest example of Trump’s embrace of divisive issues as he slides further behind Joe Biden in polls of the presidential race. In recent days, Trump has promised to deploy more federal forces to cities led by Democrats, he’s falsely denounced mail ballots as a source of pervasive fraud and he’s repeatedly described himself as the last line of defense against left-wing radicalism.
Within hours of his signing of the directive on the census, the White House also threatened to veto bipartisan legislation to fund the Pentagon because it would require renaming military bases currently named for Confederate leaders.
Whether Trump’s shrinking base of conservative, mostly rural, white voters will rally around such scorched-earth politics remains unknown. Some polls suggest that at a time when the country is reckoning with the deadly coronavirus crisis and resulting economic devastation, some of Trump’s supporters have turned against him over his divisiveness.
But the moves signal a focused effort by a president to ratchet up the nation’s tensions, rather than calm them, which is without recent precedent.
“As hundreds of Americans die each day from the COVID-19 virus, and thousands more become infected, President Trump continues to play political games,” said California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a Democrat.
“Trump’s nativist dog whistle has turned into a bullhorn, and most Americans are tired of the act,” he added.
According to a presidential memo released by the White House on Tuesday, census workers would continue counting immigrants who are in the country illegally, but they would not be factored into decisions about congressional representation. The Census Bureau would have five months to come up with a way to accurately estimate the number of residents illegally in each state in order to subtract them from the overall count.
“Respect for the law and protection of the integrity of the democratic process warrant the exclusion of illegal aliens from the apportionment base,” the memo says.
Trump followed up his memo with a statement claiming there’s “a broader left-wing effort to erode the rights of Americans citizens.”
“My administration will not support giving congressional representation to aliens who enter or remain in the country unlawfully, because doing so would create perverse incentives and undermine our system of government,” he said. “Just as we do not give political power to people who are here temporarily, we should not give political power to people who should not be here at all.”
Excluding immigrants in the U.S. illegally from the count would likely cost California at least one congressional seat, maybe more, demographers say.