Court rules against Trump's attempt to not include undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Census

To the consternation of Donald Trump, a panel of judges ruled that the government must count unauthorized immigrants for the Census.

A special three-judge court in New York Thursday blocked the Trump administration's efforts to leave out unauthorized immigrants from the census numbers that determine each state's share of seats in Congress.

“This is a huge victory for voting rights and for immigrants‘ rights,” Dale Ho, 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 judicial panel's decision comes after the release of a Trump memo in July  that directs Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, to stop including  undocumented immigrants from the apportionment count.

Excluding undocumented immigrants from the census could benefit Republicans electorally. One study found that California, which is solidly Democratic, could lose two House seats if undocumented immigrants did not get counted. The state’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, sued to stop the move in July.

The lawsuit challenged “President Trump’s lawless attempt to exclude undocumented immigrants from the ‘persons’ who must be counted in the census for purposes of apportioning congressional seats to states.”

Plaintiffs are the New York Immigration Coalition, Make the Road New York, CASA, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, ADC Research Institute, FIEL Houston, and AHRI for Justice.

The U.S. Constitution mandates that the Census count every person living in the U.S. regardless of status. The Census, currently underway, is scheduled to end it's effort on Sept. 30. That deadline is also being challenged because the government and the Census Bureau had previously agreed to extend the Census count to the end of October because the pandemic had interfered the Census' timetable.

Besides the New York case, there are eight other lawsuits in courts in other parts of the country filed against Trump's attempt to affect representation in Congress.

The New York ruling is likely to be appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court. Federal law allows decisions by a three-judge court — which are convened for lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of how congressional seats are reapportioned — to skip having to go in front of an appeals court.

“We will not be moved by the President’s attempts to silence people in our country," said the Asian Americans Advancing Justice coalition of five legal advocacy agencies. 

"This is the latest in a series of attempts to politicize the census and use it as a weapon in his anti-immigrant agenda," continued the AAAJ statement. "It is a move straight out of the white supremacists’ playbook that has every discriminatory practice to restrict the rights of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian American people.”

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