NPR: Trump Sued For Attempt To Omit Unauthorized Immigrants From A Key Census Count

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. …

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.”

Among the other plaintiffs are the cities of Atlanta and Paterson, N.J., a refugee advocacy organization based in San Diego called Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, and a group of individual U.S. citizens who live in New York and Florida — all of whom allege that because they are in areas with an “above-average number of undocumented immigrants,” Trump’s memo would hurt their rights to fair representation in Congress. …

Minutes after Common Cause issued a press release Thursday announcing its legal challenge, Trump’s reelection campaign sent an email to supporters soliciting $23 donations by offering “an exact replica” of the pen the president used to sign the memo.

The president’s memo makes no mention of excluding unauthorized immigrants from the census in general, only from the “apportionment base” used to redistribute House seats.

But the campaign’s email described the memo as an “executive order” that was signed to “put America FIRST by blocking illegal aliens from receiving congressional representation and being counted in the U.S. Census.”