U.S. President Joe Biden signs a series of executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House after being sworn in at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20, 2021.
U.S. President Joe Biden issued an executive order Wednesday (Jan. 20) requiring the Census Bureau (Census) to include illegal immigrants in the baseline data for assigning seats in Congress.
This comes after former President Trump (Trump) tried to exclude foreigners and won a lawsuit in the Supreme Court.
According to the executive order signed by Biden, the Secretary of Commerce “shall report aggregate population tables by State to reflect the total resident population in each State as of the date of the census designated in section 141(a) of title 13, United States Code, without regard to immigration status.”
“In addition, the Secretary of Commerce shall use the population tables to reflect the total number of persons ordinarily resident in each State as of the date of the Census. Immigration status is not considered in reports to governors and officials, or to public agencies responsible for legislative apportionment or zoning in each state.”
In the U.S., congressional seats are allocated on the basis of each state’s population, with states with larger populations getting a larger share of the seats. Last year, Trump’s appeal to the Supreme Court in the “Census Exclusion of Illegal Immigrants” case momentarily stoked concerns among opponents that several states, including California, would lose seats.
The Supreme Court took up the Trump Administration‘s lawsuit on Oct. 16, 2020, and nine justices heard oral arguments by telephone on Nov. 30, 2020, before ruling on Dec. 18, 2020, that the federal government could exclude illegal immigrants from the 2020 census count in order to divide congressional seats among states based on their legal U.S. population.
Trump previously directed the executive branch through two executive orders to give citizenship data to the Census Bureau, which would use the data to identify illegal aliens and then exclude them from the seat division reports. The Supreme Court upheld the legality of those orders.
The Census Bureau was scheduled to turn in its report by Dec. 31, 2020, but missed the statutory deadline. The bureau soon thereafter stopped complying with Trump’s order. Then-director Steven Dillingham sent a memo on Jan. 13 asking workers to stop complying with Trump’s citizenship mandate. Dillingham later resigned on Jan. 18.
In Congress, nearly all Democrats opposed Trump’s strike-out order.
The new order does not outline a deadline for the Census Bureau to release the data, and it is unclear when the bureau will be ready to sub-seat the data.
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