Supreme Court to Decide Whether Census Must Count Illegal Immigrants in Allocating House Seats
The Supreme Court said Friday it would discuss if President Donald Trump should exempt undocumented aliens from the census count used to evaluate Congress' composition.
To put the case on a fast track, the high court has set it for oral arguments on Nov. 30. According to NBC, Judge Amy Coney Barrett could join in the case if she's confirmed by then.
For the first time in July, Trump released an order to exempt what he termed "criminal immigrants" from the decennial reapportionment of seats between states in the House of Representatives.
The switch will undoubtedly transfer the representation to more conservative and Republican-leaning states with lower immigrant communities from metropolitan regions and Democratic-trending states.
The Constitution requires a census every 10 years, and the findings decide how many Congressional representatives each state gets in the House.
The data were often used to measure the allocation of $1.5 trillion in funds under many federal schemes from a municipal government. A three-judge court in New York stopped Trump's proposal as breaking federal law.
Will it reduce the number of representatives?
Advocacy groups and New York-led states said Trump seeks to rig the count to deprive congressional seats of Democratic-leaning regions with large immigrant communities.
The federal statute allows the Secretary of Commerce to give the census tally to the President by Dec. 31, and the President to provide the figures to Congress by Jan. 10 for the redistribution of House seats.
In July, a memorandum setting out the proposal to remove illegal immigrants from all records was released by Trump.
The New York tribunal said in its decision against Trump, the U.S. Congressional distribution is mandated by the Census Act to be focused on the total number of persons in each province.
The judges said the administration's approach would also breach a separate provision that a single collection of numbers obtained from the census be provided to the President by the Commerce Secretary.
In his appeal, Trump stated that certain laws give space for the President to assert the power to exempt individuals who are not lawfully in the country.
The administration claimed in court papers that federal law "must not curb the President's power to order the secretary to make policy choices that result in the decennial census."
Whole number
The challengers also argue that the proposal contradicts the Constitution, which includes the distribution of congressional seats according to the "full number of individuals in each province."
"The memorandum implements a policy that breaks with more than two hundred years of history and violates the plain text and purpose of both the Census Act and the Constitution," the New York-led group argued.
The decision to take up the case followed an order from the Supreme Court on Oct. 13 that enabled the Trump administration to complete the census more than two weeks early.
Civil rights advocates wanted until Oct. 31 to make the count begin, claiming an early end will leave minorities undercounted.
Last year, the Supreme Court barred the administration's move to provide the decennial census with a citizenship issue.
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