Trump Sued for Excluding Undocumented Immigrants From Census

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump was hit with the first of what will likely be several lawsuits challenging his executive order seeking to exclude undocumented immigrants from census data used to determine congressional districts.

Government-accountability group Common Cause said Trump’s order “flouts the Constitution’s plain language” in its complaint filed Thursday in federal court in Washington, noting that the nation’s founding law requires the decennial census to count the “whole number of persons in each state” in apportioning congressional seats.

The cities of Atlanta, Georgia, and Paterson, New Jersey, and refugee advocacy group Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans were also plaintiffs in the suit. A number of other groups and state attoneys general have also vowed to challenge the order the president signed Tuesday.

Trump and many of his conservative allies believe that counting undocumented immigrants in congressional districts ultimately benefits Democrats. According to a recent report by the Center for Immigration Studies, the presence of undocumented immigrants across the U.S. is set to redistribute three House seats in the 2020 census: Ohio, Alabama and Minnesota will each lose a seat, the report says, and California, New York and Texas will each gain one.

The Department of Commerce, which oversees the census, did not respond to a request for comment. In the memo announcing the policy change, the administration said: “The discretion delegated to the executive branch to determine who qualifies as an ‘inhabitant’ includes authority to exclude from the apportionment base aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status.”

The executive order on Tuesday was not the first time the White House has sought to alter the census. Last year, the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration from adding a citizenship question to the census questionnaire, ruling that the government’s reasoning for the change seemed “contrived.”

The U.S. Census Bureau’s rules state that the counting process is “guided by the constitutional and statutory mandates to count all residents of the several states,” including citizens of foreign countries living in the U.S. Common Cause’s lawsuit argues that the Trump administration’s new rule “purports to break with almost 250 years of past practice.”

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