The attorneys general of Louisiana, Kansas, Ohio, and West Virginia are seeking to block the United States Census Bureau from including illegal immigrants in the count used to apportion congressional seats and electoral votes.
The lawsuit, filed in Louisiana federal court on Sunday, the day before President Donald Trump took office, argues that the Biden administration agreed to include illegal immigrants in the 2020 census as part of the population calculation used to allocate congressional seats and electoral votes. According to reports, Ohio and West Virginia lost a congressional seat and an electoral vote to states with bigger concentrations of illegal immigrants and temporary visa holders.
According to the lawsuit, Texas won one congressional seat and one electoral vote, while California retained a congressional seat and an electoral vote “that it would have otherwise lost.”
The attorneys general say that if the practice continues, Louisiana and Kansas will each lose a congressional seat and an electoral vote in the 2030 reapportionment.
“We shouldn’t lose representation in Congress due to the presence of illegal aliens harbored by other states,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a statement. “Counting Illegal Aliens in the census to determine Congressional seats and electoral votes is unlawful. We have sued to stop it.”
In February 2018, the United States Census Bureau developed criteria for the 2020 census, known as the “Residence Rule,” which states that foreign nationals living in the United States are counted in the census and assigned to the state where their “usual residence” is located. The lawsuit states that this applies regardless of whether such foreign nationals are lawfully present in the United States and “regardless of whether any visa they may possess is temporary.”
After the 2020 census, the lawsuit claims that former President Biden’s Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, as well as the Census Bureau and its director, Robert Santos, decided to include “illegal aliens and aliens holding temporary visas (‘nonimmigrant aliens’) in the census figures used for determining the apportionment of the House of Representatives and Electoral College votes.”
The lawsuit claims that the Residence Rule violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal representation principle by “robbing the people of the Plaintiff States of their rightful share of political representation, while systematically redistributing political power to states with high numbers of illegal aliens and nonimmigrant aliens,” as well as Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution by “necessitating an unconstitutional distribution of Electoral College votes.”
“The Residence Rule also breaches the federal government’s constitutional obligation to conduct an ‘actual Enumeration’ of the number of “persons in each State,” the lawsuit says. “The phrase ‘persons in each State’ was understood at both the Founding and in the Reconstruction era to be restricted to United States citizens and permanent resident aliens who had been lawfully admitted to the body politic constituted by the Constitution.”
It continues, “Aliens who are unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States did not qualify because they are not entitled to political representation. It has long been understood that foreign diplomats temporarily in the U.S. also did not qualify.”
“But, in any case, the Fourteenth Amendment separately requires that illegal aliens who have been denied the right to vote be excluded from state apportionment,” the lawsuit says. “Thus, the actual enumeration of the population of the states cannot include such aliens. Only U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents (“LPRs,” also known as “green card holders”) can be included.”
The attorneys general claim that illegal immigration “affects the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College because the illegal alien population is both large and highly concentrated in a minority of states.”
The lawsuit goes on to summarize studies indicating that there are around 11.7 million illegal immigrants in the United States, adding that over the last three decades, the country “has been undergoing the largest wave of immigration in American history.”
“Counting illegal aliens in the census takes voting power from some Americans and gives it to others,” the lawsuit says.
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump threatened mass deportations and declared a state of emergency at the southern border. It is unclear how the case will affect the incoming Trump administration.