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Donald Trump’s administration hopes the higher court will give him a quick victory and thus prevent the case from escalating into a long judicial saga, just weeks before Democrat Joe Biden enters the White House.
The Donald Trump administration’s battle to exclude illegals from the census tally, which determines the electoral map in the United States, met with resistance on Monday in the Supreme Court, where Conservatives are the majority. During the hearing, several judges showed resistance to Trump’s plan, but it was unclear whether they can choose to block him or if they will let him advance with this proposal that can change the electoral map in the country.
One of the main obstacles that Trump’s argument faced has been the uncertainty about the method the government will use to calculate the number of undocumented and the delays in delivering the census results, which most likely will not be delivered on December 31. , as it should be.
With the census already concluded, the president of the Supreme Court, John Robert, declared that “it is not known how many foreigners will be excluded and what the effect will be on the distribution of seats”.
See more: Undocumented in the United States: 21st Century Slaves?
The directive issued by Trump in July met with resistance in the courts of several states, led by New York, as well as other local governments and human rights groups.
And several lower-ranking courts have ruled that the president has no power to alter the census results by subtracting the number of irregular migrants.
The government representative before the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Wall, admitted that he did not have a formula for calculating how many people can be excluded and in which categories, noting, for example, that immigrants in detention could be removed. “We don’t know what’s feasible,” Wall said.
“You can’t claim I’m not here.”
New York State Delegate Barbara Underwood said at the hearing that “the government can do many things to induce undocumented immigrants to leave, but it cannot declare they are not here.”
The Trump administration tries to divide the census count to distinguish between the total population and the number of people who are legally residing. To make this calculation, the government indicated it could use data from other agencies, as the Supreme Court has already blocked an attempt by Trump to include a nationality question in the survey.
The current system grants states like California and Texas, with large immigrant populations, additional seats in the House of Representatives.
According to consultancy Pew, there are about 10.5 million undocumented migrants in the United States, and such a change could have major consequences for California, Florida and Texas in the upcoming elections.
How many foreigners will be excluded?
Per Dal Ho, the director of the voting rights project of the influential civil rights organization American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) argued that the exclusion of the undocumented goes against tradition.
“For 230 years, since the days of the founders, states have always assigned seats in the House based on the number of people in each state, regardless of their immigration status,” Ho said.
The three progressive judges and also Conservative Judge Amy Coney Barrett, appointed by Trump this year, seemed sensitive to this issue. “If a person who has been in the country, say 20 years, even illegally, why wouldn’t that person have an established residence here?” Said Coney Barrett.
In their questions to the government representative, the judges suggested that a change in the precedent of the ruling is difficult to implement. “We don’t know what the Commerce Department will do, what the president will do, how many foreigners will be excluded and the effect,” said the head of the court, John Roberts, in Congress.
However, if the court waits, Trump could be favored, as he could have the freedom to act without limitations before Biden comes to power on January 20.
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