Trump had tried to exclude unauthorized immigrants from 2020 census counts used to draw congressional districts.
A federal court in New York struck down a presidential memorandum on Thursday that would have excluded unauthorized immigrants living in the US from census population counts for purposes of redrawing congressional districts in 2021 — a transparent attack on their political power.
Most states currently draw congressional districts, determining the areas that each elected official represents based on total population, including unauthorized immigrants. Current maps are due to be redrawn across the country in 2021 after the results of the 2020 census come in, and the stakes are high: Each redistricting has a lasting influence on who is likely to win elections, which communities will be represented in Congress, and, ultimately, what laws will will be passed.
President Donald Trump’s attempt to exclude unauthorized immigrants would have reduced the counts in areas where foreign-born populations have traditionally settled — primarily Democrat-run cities — and therefore undermined their political power relative to more rural, Republican-run areas. But it could have also impacted red states with large immigrant populations, including Texas.
A panel of three federal judges found Thursday, however, found that the memorandum skirted the federal government’s constitutional obligation to count every person, no matter their immigration status, in the census every ten years.
The administration can appeal that ruling directly to the US Supreme Court, which would likely be under pressure to issue an expedited decision before the Census Bureau’s December 31 deadline to send population counts to Congress. (The current deadline to respond to the census is September 30, though an ongoing lawsuit demands that the Trump administration push back that deadline on account of the pandemic.)
“This is a huge victory for voting rights and for immigrants’ rights,” Dale Ho, who argued the case and is director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement. “President Trump has tried and failed yet again to weaponize the census against immigrant communities. The law is clear — every person counts in the census.”
The White House had argued that by law, the president has the final say over who must be counted in the census. And Trump said when he announced the memorandum in July that unauthorized immigrants should not be counted because it would undermine American representative democracy and create “perverse incentives” for those seeking to come to the US.
“There used to be a time when you could proudly declare, ‘I am a citizen of the United States,’” Trump said in a statement at the time. “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 Americans citizens, and I will not stand for it.”
Trump has tried to politicize the census before
This wasn’t the first time that Trump has used the census to target immigrants. In June 2019, Trump lost his bid to put a question about citizenship status on the 2020 census at the Supreme Court. Several states, including California and New York, said the question would depress response rates among immigrant communities and cost their governments critical federal funding.
Trump, on the other hand, had argued that citizenship data would aid the Department of Justice’s enforcement of the prohibitions against racial discrimination in voting. But that rationale was just a pretext, introduced after the fact to justify the question and meant to obscure the administration’s actual reasoning, the justices found.
Had the administration decided to continue pursuing the citizenship question, it would have had to race to support its decision with more valid reasoning in order to print the census forms on time.
Trump ultimately decided against doing so, instead issuing an executive order in July 2019 that instructed the US Census Bureau to estimate citizenship data using enhanced state administrative records. Trump suggested at the time that the data could be used to draw electoral districts in 2021 based on where eligible voters live, as legislators in Texas, Arizona, Missouri, and Nebraska had already sought.
Trump has facilitated the creation of that data, though it’s not clear just how accurate it is. The executive order authorized the Census Bureau to collect more data from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, US Customs and Border Protection, and US Citizenship and Immigration Services in an attempt to identify the citizenship status of more people. The bureau later started asking states to voluntarily turn over driver’s license records, which typically include citizenship data, to determine the citizenship status of the US population.
Tuesday’s memorandum represents the culmination of those efforts, which immigrant advocates saw as a blatant attempt to strip resources and political power from brown and Black communities. Beyond its impact on apportionment and redistricting, they had feared that the memorandum could have indirectly discouraged immigrants who had yet to respond to the census from doing so. It could have hurt communities with large immigrant populations, as federal funding is usually determined by census counts.
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Author: Nicole Narea
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