US President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a memorandum instructing the US census bureau to exclude undocumented immigrants from the population numbers that are used to decide the number of seats that each state gets in Congress.
The memo, titled ‘Excluding Illegal Aliens From the Apportionment Base Following the 2020 Census’ instructs Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross “to exclude from the apportionment base aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status under the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended (8 U.S.C. 1101 et seq.), to the maximum extent feasible and consistent with the discretion delegated to the executive branch”, claiming that including those “who have no followed the steps to secure a lawful immigration status under our laws” undermines the principles of representative democracy that form the basis of the US government system.
The move marks Trump’s latest attempt to advance his immigration agenda, and is likely to be met with a flood of legal and political challenges. In 2019, the Supreme Court struck down an attempt by the administration to ask respondents if they are US citizens. The government, however, can collect information on citizenship status by other means.
The American Civil and Liberties Union (ACLU) has said that it plans to sue the administration for its “unconstitutional” attack on immigrant communities. Other groups, like the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, CASA, and the state attorney general’s offices in New York and California have also signaled that they will pursue legal action against the memo. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also condemned Trump’s actions, saying “the House of Representatives will vigorously contest the President's unconstitutional and unlawful attempt to impair the Census” in a written statement. Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee say they will hold an emergency hearing about the census next week.
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Since the first-ever US census in 1790, both US citizens and non-citizens have been included in the official population counts. Convincing immigrant communities to participate in the census has already proved to be challenging, and Trump’s hardline anti-immigration stance threatens to exacerbate this fear. According to Census.gov, 62.2% of the country has responded to the census so far.
Also on Tuesday, the House of Representatives approved a national defense authorization bill worth $740 billion, which would grant a 3% pay raise for troops and require the military to remove the names of Confederate soldiers and leaders from military bases. It advanced with a bipartisan, veto-proof majority of 295 to 125, which is bound to irk President Trump, who has defended those displaying Confederate emblems and flags and called them “victims of cancel culture”.