President Trump has issued an executive order that will ban illegal immigrants from being counted in the 2020 census for purposes of apportioning members of Congress.
It will be the “policy of the United States to exclude from the apportionment base aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status under the Immigration and Nationality Act,” the order reads.
President Trump has instructed Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to provide him with the number of undocumented individuals in order to subtract them from population totals. It’s unclear what criteria will be used to determine citizenship status.
The Trump administration moved to include a citizenship-status question on the 2020 census but that order was struck down by the Supreme Court.
The ACLU is vowing to sue the administration over this latest order.
“The Constitution requires that everyone in the U.S. be counted in the census. President Trump can’t pick and choose,” said the ACLU’s Dale Ho.
“He tried to add a citizenship question to the census and lost in the Supreme Court. His latest attempt to weaponize the census for an attack on immigrant communities will be found unconstitutional. We’ll see him in court, and win, again,” said Ho.
The Constitution calls for the census to count “persons” living in the U.S. and does not specify citizenship status. Lower courts have ruled that illegal immigrants should be counted but the Supreme Court has yet to rule definitively on the matter.
Photo by The White House