Trump Sued Over Attempt To Omit Unauthorized Immigrants From A Key Census Count
July 24, 202010:11 AM ET
HANSI LO WANG
Groups led by Common Cause, a government watchdog group, have filed the first federal lawsuit against the Trump administration in response to President Trump's call to make an unprecedented change to the population numbers used to divide up seats in Congress among the states.
The complaint was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Thursday, two days after Trump issued a memo calling to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the constitutionally mandated count of every person living in the country that is used to redistribute seats in the House of Representatives.
The Constitution — which empowers Congress, not the president, with final authority over the census — requires a once-a-decade count of the "whole number of persons in each state" to determine how to reapportion congressional seats and, by extension, Electoral College votes.
Trump, however, has ordered information to be produced that would allow him to exclude the number of immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization from the latest state population counts that the president is legally required to deliver to Congress after the census is complete.
Connecting the memo with the administration's failed attempt to add the now-blocked citizenship question to the 2020 census, the plaintiffs allege that all of the efforts are "part of an unconstitutional concerted effort to shift political power away from racial and ethnic minorities, chiefly Latinos" to Republicans and non-Hispanic white people.
They are asking a federal judge to declare the president's memo in violation of the Constitution and federal laws as well as to block the administration from carrying it out and the clerk of the House from certifying an apportionment count delivered by the president that does not include people "on the basis of their citizenship or immigration status."
more:
http://www.npr.org/2020/07/24/894322040/trump-sued-for-attempt-to-omit-unauthorized-immigrants-from-a-key-census-count
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