Despite liberal judges overriding the president and getting undocumented immigrants counted on the 2020 census, President Trump has continued to fight back. He initially pushed for an official count that would be separate from the census to collect information about how many legal citizens there are for the purposes of how the government governs.
Now he is reportedly issuing an executive order to make sure that the 2020 census does not give illegal immigrants access to congressional representation. In our opinion, this is common sense but it appears it takes an executive order from President Trump to make it happen.
There will likely be legal challenges from left-wing judges but this newest action from the White House shows that President Trump is still pushing his America First agenda. The Hill tweeted:
#BREAKING: Trump issues executive order blocking undocumented immigrants from counting toward House representation http://hill.cm/L5AzOcz
#BREAKING: Trump issues executive order blocking undocumented immigrants from counting toward House representation https://t.co/7wRU5q1hC7 pic.twitter.com/7TMov5Av3U
— The Hill (@thehill) July 21, 2020
The Hill reported in part:
The order, which immediately prompted legal challenges, amounts to something of a workaround for Trump after the Supreme Court last year blocked the administration from adding a citizenship question to the decennial survey.
The rationale for the memo rests on the argument that the president has final say over transmitting the final census report to Congress and that the constitution does not explicitly define which persons must be included in determining apportionment.
“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,” the order states. “Excluding these illegal aliens from the apportionment base is more consonant with the principles of representative democracy underpinning our system of Government.
The order implicitly calls out California — a state represented overwhelmingly by Democrats in Congress — in making the argument for discounting undocumented immigrants, noting that “one State is home to more than 2.2 million illegal aliens.”
