Immigrant rights groups seek to dismiss a Republican lawsuit to exclude noncitizens from US census

Immigrant rights groups are seeking to toss out a Republican lawsuit that would prohibit the U.S. Census Bureau from counting people who are in the U.S. illegally during the 2030 census.

The groups said the lawsuit filed late last month by Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway would violate the law and require a recount of the U.S. population from 2020, costing billions of dollars.

“That unlawful request would distort representation for millions of Americans and shake the foundations of our representative democracy,” said the motion from the immigrant rights groups, which are seeking to intervene and are being represented by several ACLU Foundation chapters.

The lawsuit is the latest effort by Republicans to exclude people who are in the U.S. illegally or other noncitizens from the census figures. Those numbers guide the distribution of federal money and determine the number of congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state receives in a process known as apportionment.

The Missouri lawsuit asks that the apportionment process that used the 2020 census figures be redone without including people in the U.S. illegally and that the process after the 2030 census be conducted in the same manner.

A similar lawsuit filed by four other GOP state attorneys general is pending in federal court in Louisiana, and Republican lawmakers in Congress have introduced legislation that would accomplish the same goal.

A Republican redistricting expert had written that using only the citizen voting-age population, rather than the total population, for the purpose of redrawing congressional and state legislative districts could be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.

The Constitution’s 14th Amendment says “the whole number of persons in each state” should be counted for the numbers used for apportionment. The Census Bureau has interpreted that to mean anybody living in the U.S., regardless of legal status.

The Missouri lawsuit comes as President Donald Trump has been pressuring Republican-led state legislatures to redraw their congressional districts to benefit the GOP ahead of this year's midterm elections. Last August, Trump instructed the Commerce Department to have the Census Bureau start work on a new census that would exclude immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally from the head count.

Intervenors recently succeeded in getting another lawsuit against the Census Bureau tossed out. A three-judge panel in Tampa last week dismissed a challenge by Republican groups to the agency's statistical methods during the 2020 census.

During a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick acknowledged that citizenship wasn’t a factor in the apportionment process under the Constitution. When asked if a citizenship question would be included, he said the agency hadn’t determined the questions on the 2030 census form yet. The Commerce Department oversees the Census Bureau.

“What the questionnaire is, I don’t know, and we’ve not decided,” Lutnick said.

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