Trump’s planned executive order could prove popular with President’s support base (File)
Washington:
President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Tuesday to prevent migrants who are illegally in the United States from being counted when congressional constituencies are redrawn in the next round of redistribution.
U.S. Census experts and lawyers say the action would be legally dubious, likely benefiting Trump’s Republican Party by illegally wiping out the largely non-white migrant population in the United States.
Redistribution occurs both at the state level to draw maps for state legislatures and at the federal level to draw maps for congressional districts. These are known as congressional allocations.
Supporters of citizen-only constituencies argue that every vote should have equal weight. If one constituency has significantly fewer eligible voters than another, they say, each vote has more influence on election results.
Democrats and immigrant rights activists say the inclusion of non-voters ensures elected leaders represent all who depend on public services like schools and garbage collection, regardless of eligibility to vote.
Trump planned to sign the order at 12:15 a.m. Eastern Time in the Oval Office.
A senior administration official said Trump must argue that removing illegal immigrants from congressional distribution maps is necessary to ensure that only legal residents of the United States have a voice in federal politics.
“President Trump’s executive order excluding illegal immigrants from the allocation base is another decisive step towards fulfilling his solemn commitment to ensure that only American citizens are represented in Congress, and not illegal aliens,” he said the official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
But this decision raises major legal questions and will likely lead to litigation.
Citizen-only electoral districts are considered potentially legal for state-level electoral districts, but the US Constitution explicitly states that the allocation in Congress should be based on the “total number of people” in each state. Numerous federal statutes have reinforced this reading and the Supreme Court of the United States has upheld this interpretation.
“All of this makes Trump’s position scandalous,” said Joshua Geltzer, a constitutional law expert and professor at Georgetown Law, adding that the ruling will almost certainly lead to litigation.
Another question is how the Trump administration would acquire data on undocumented immigrants. The 2020 U.S. Census does not ask respondents whether they are citizens, legal or not.
In theory, officials could determine citizenship data through administrative records such as driver’s license databases, as well as citizenship estimates collected in other Census Bureau surveys. But that data is incomplete, and demographers and immigration rights groups have argued it is unreliable.
The government census helps determine where taxpayer money is spent on the construction of public facilities such as schools, hospitals and fire departments, as well as calculating the distribution of states in the House of Representatives the United States. The US Constitution states that the United States counts its population every 10 years.
Trump’s planned executive order could prove popular with the president’s support base as he tries to build enthusiasm for his re-election in November.
Trump has spent much of his presidency seeking to limit the number of migrants entering the United States illegally, particularly from Central America, and his executive order was also part of his immigration agenda.
It has long been a strategy of the Trump administration to use the census to identify and limit the political power of undocumented immigrants. But the efforts met with obstacles.
In 2018, the administration said it would ask respondents to the 2020 census whether they were citizens, a decision ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court.
In the aftermath of the defeat, Trump issued an executive order in July 2019 to determine citizenship status through a wealth of administrative documents. The ordinance, which called on states to forward this data to the U.S. Census Bureau, continues to face litigation from immigration advocates, including the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
