TRUMP TAKES CENSUS FIGHT TO HIGH COURT

Seeks exclusion of undocumented immigrants

WASHINGTON

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to overturn or expedite consideration of a lower court’s decision barring the government from excluding unauthorized immigrants when congressional seats are apportioned among the states.

A special three-judge panel out of New York earlier this month declared Trump’s July 21 memorandum on the matter “an unlawful exercise of the authority granted to the President” and blocked the Commerce Department and the Census Bureau from including information about the number of undocumented immigrants in their reports to the president after this year’s decennial census is completed.

In his appeal, acting solicitor general Jeffrey Wall requested that the court resolve the case before Dec. 31, when the Commerce Department must report census data to the president.

Otherwise, he wrote, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Trump “will be forced to make reports by the statutory deadlines that do not reflect the President’s important policy decision concerning the apportionment.”

Excluding undocumented immigrants would overturn the way apportionment has been implemented for more than two centuries, and census experts and constitutional scholars say it would not be legal.

The Sept. 10 ruling by the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York was in response to two consolidated lawsuits over the memo — one filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Texas and the law firm Arnold & Porter; and one filed by Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James along with 22 other state attorneys general and 14 cities and counties across the country.

Constitutional scholars have noted that for legislative apportionment, Section 2 of the 14th Amendment requires a count of all persons usually residing in the country, without regard to citizenship status.