Trump: Bar undocumented from census
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed a memorandum Tuesday in support of barring undocumented immigrants from being counted for congressional apportionment next year.
Doing so, he said, would represent a “better understanding of the Constitution” than the way apportionment has been implemented for over two centuries.
“For the purpose of the reapportionment of Representatives following the 2020 census, it is the policy of the United States to exclude from the apportionment base aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status … to the maximum extent feasible and consistent with the discretion delegated to the executive branch,” the memo said. The effect would likely shift several seats from Democratic states to Republican states.
Democratic lawmakers blasted it, and civil rights organizations that successfully challenged the administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the census said they will sue over it.
“Today’s memorandum will end up in the dustbin of history as yet another exemplar of Donald Trump’s disturbing embrace of white nationalism,” Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said in a statement. “MALDEF will be in court to stop this latest example of blatantly unconstitutional executive action by a failed presidency.”
Dale Ho, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that Trump’s “latest attempt to weaponize the census for an attack on immigrant communities will be found unconstitutional. We’ll see him in court, and win, again.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat who led a multistate suit against the question, also said she will challenge the memo in court.
“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 the 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 conceal 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 stand for it.”
As a practical matter, Trump’s order could not be carried out even were it legal, because no official tally of immigrants living in the U.S. exists, and federal law bars the use of population estimates for reapportionment purposes.
“I think the Donald Trump view is: ‘I can look like I’m trying to do something by stoking anti-immigrant fervor, and if I lose in court then, I just stoke anti-court fervor too,’” Joshua A. Geltzer, the director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown, said in an interview. “It should be legally impossible as well as factually difficult to do.”
Since taking office, the Trump administration repeatedly has tried to change the way the decennial census is carried out and how its data is used.
Trump’s efforts to add the citizenship question drew fury and backlash from critics who alleged that it was intended to discourage participation in the nation’s head count, not only by people living in the country illegally but also by citizens who fear that participating would expose noncitizen family members to repercussions.
After the Supreme Court blocked the citizenship question from being asked, Trump ordered the Census Bureau to gather citizenship data from the administrative records of federal and state agencies. The administration hopes that will help it determine how many people are in the U.S. illegally.
That order is being challenged in the courts and the overwhelming majority of states have refused to share information about driver’s licenses and ID cards.
More than 92 million households have already responded to the 2020 Census, with the majority doing it online. People can still respond on their own online, over the phone or by mail — all without having to meet a census taker. Only last week, door-knockers started heading out to households whose residents haven’t yet answered the questionnaire.