The Federal court blocked an attempt by T 'n Co to exclude undocumented immigrants (from Census) for a congressional seat count.
A special three-judge court in New York has ruled to block the Trump administration’s efforts to make an unprecedented change to the constitutionally mandated count of every person living in the country — leaving out unauthorized immigrants from the census numbers that determine each state’s share of seats in Congress.
The ruling comes after the July release of a memorandum by President Trump that directs Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, to provide Trump with information needed to exclude immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization from the apportionment count.
Since the first U.S. census in 1790, the country’s official once-a-decade population numbers used to reapportion seats in the House of Representatives have included both U.S. citizens and noncitizens, regardless of immigration status. Enacted after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment ended the counting of an enslaved person as “three fifths” of a free person by requiring the counting of the "whole number of persons in each state."
The president ultimately plays a limited role in reapportioning Congress. After the president hands off the latest numbers to Congress, it is the clerk of the House of Representatives who is supposed to send to the governors a “certificate of the number of Representatives” each state receives, according to Title 2 of the U.S. Code.
Trump’s memorandum has sparked a total of eight legal challenges around the country. In addition to the two based in Manhattan, federal judges are hearing cases over the memo in northern California, Washington, D.C., Massachusetts and Maryland, where an ongoing lawsuit about the administration’s efforts to produce citizenship data was expanded last month with additional allegations about the memo.