Supreme Court Weighs Trump Rule Keeping Illegal Aliens Out of Census Count
President Donald Trump’s attempt to exclude illegal aliens from the population count used to divvy up congressional seats is headed for a post-Thanksgiving Supreme Court showdown.
The administration’s top lawyers are hoping the justices on a court that includes three Trump appointees will condone the idea, which has been rejected by lower courts. Arguments will take place on Monday by telephone.
The justices will weigh a bid to remove non-citizens from the once-a-decade census count, which determines how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives as well as the allocation of some federal funding.
Federal courts in California, Maryland and New York have ruled that Trump’s plan violates the Constitution, which provides that “representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State.”
“What Trump wants to do would be a radical break from that. The losers wouldn’t be individual people. It would be entire states and communities that would lose representation when undocumented members of those communities get cut out of the count used to apportion the House,” said Dale Ho, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who will argue on behalf of immigration advocates and civil rights groups in the Supreme Court case.
The Trump administration argues that both the Constitution and federal law allow the president to exclude illegal aliens from the apportionment count.
“As history, precedent, and structure indicate, the President need not treat all illegal aliens as ‘inhabitants’ of the States and thereby allow their defiance of federal law to distort the allocation of the people’s Representatives,” acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall wrote.
By the administration’s estimate, California could lose two to three House seats if the more than 2 million people living there illegally were excluded from the census count.
One thing seems likely: The current court case won’t be the last legal fight over the 2020 census. Final apportionment numbers have been litigated frequently in past decades.
“What would a census be without a lot of litigation?” Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former congressional aide who specializes in census issues, said.
The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.
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