In California and Texas, a group of Democratic voters is seeking to join a legal battle initiated by a coalition of four Republican state attorneys general. This lawsuit aims to prevent undocumented individuals from being counted in the population figures used to allocate congressional seats among the states.
The five voters submitted their motion on Monday, arguing that the lawsuit could adversely affect their representation in Congress and, subsequently, the Electoral College votes assigned to their states. This legal action was launched over a week ago by GOP attorneys general from Kansas, Louisiana, Ohio, and West Virginia. Their objective is to exclude undocumented individuals from the population counts utilized in determining congressional seat distribution following the decennial census.
The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution asserts that “the whole number of persons in each state” must be counted for the purpose of population-based apportionment. The voters from California and Texas contend that the amendment makes it abundantly clear that all residents, regardless of immigration status, should be considered in this count.
During his first presidency, Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at excluding undocumented individuals from the 2020 census figures that inform congressional seat allocation. He later issued another directive requesting the use of administrative records to gather citizenship information. A redistricting expert from the Republican Party had indicated that counting only the citizen voting-age population might serve the interests of Republicans and white non-Hispanics in the redistricting process.
These orders from Trump followed a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which blocked a prior effort to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census. Both of Trump’s mandates were overturned when Joe Biden took office in January 2021, just prior to the release of the 2020 census data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In a move signaling potential changes for the 2030 census, Trump rescinded Biden’s executive order last week at the beginning of his new term.
