Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall and U.S. Representative Mo Brooks (R-Huntsville) on Tuesday praised a new President Donald Trump effort to prevent illegal immigrants from being counted when the 435 U.S. House Representatives are redistributed after the 2020 Census.
Every 10 years, after the Census is conducted, the executive branch uses the new population counts to determine how many representatives each state gets in the House.
Trump issued a memorandum on Tuesday that instructs the Secretary of Commerce not to count people who are in the United States illegally when providing tallies for the purposes of distributing House districts.
Both Marshall and Brooks see it as a victory in a fight they began many months ago. In 2018, the two men filed a lawsuit that made a very similar argument to the one in Trump’s memorandum.
Though they never backed away from the lawsuit, the effort was effectively put on hold in 2019 when the Trump administration ceased its efforts on the matter and allowed the census forms to be printed as normal.
Trump resumed the fight this week, with a memorandum that reads in part, “The discretion delegated to the executive branch to determine who qualifies as an “inhabitant” includes authority to exclude from the apportionment base aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status.”
Legal experts told Reuters that the new Trump memorandum is likely to end up in court, with an uncertain fate towards becoming policy.
Marshall, agreeing with president, said in a statement, “When the states’ Congressional seats and Electoral College votes are divided up, representation should be based on those people who reside in their states and this country lawfully.”
Brooks commented, “I enthusiastically support President Trump’s Executive Order that excludes illegal aliens from the part of the 2020 Census count that determines how many Congressmen and electoral college votes for president that each state has!”
The attorney general and the congressman agree that Alabama is likely to lose federal representation if illegal immigrants are included in the counting process.
Henry Thornton is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. You can contact him by email: henry@new-yhn.local or on Twitter @HenryThornton95
