A federal judge decided on Thursday to pause a lawsuit initiated by four Republican state attorneys general aimed at excluding undocumented individuals from the numbers used to allocate congressional seats following the decennial census.
The decision came after attorneys from the current administration, led by the Republican party, indicated that newly appointed leaders at the U.S. Department of Commerce, which oversees the U.S. Census Bureau, had yet to determine their approach to the ongoing litigation amid leadership transitions.
This legal action, brought forward by attorneys general from Kansas, Louisiana, Ohio, and West Virginia, targeted the Commerce Department in the final days of the Biden administration back in January. Since then, a shift in leadership occurred with the resignation of the Biden-appointed Census Bureau director, and the confirmation of Trump-nominated Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick by the U.S. Senate, as he replaced Gina Raimondo, a Democrat.
Under the 14th Amendment, “the whole number of persons in each state” is stipulated to be counted for apportionment, a process that distributes congressional seats and Electoral College votes among states based on population counts.
Individuals engaged with a Democratic-affiliated group from California and Texas sought to intervene in the lawsuit, arguing it would adversely affect their states by reducing congressional representation and Electoral College votes. However, the judge denied their motion, stating it would need to be refiled once the lawsuit’s hold is lifted.
A noted Republican redistricting specialist had previously suggested that basing legislative and congressional redistricting on the citizen voting-age population rather than total population could potentially benefit Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.
During his first presidential term, Donald Trump made unsuccessful attempts to insert a citizenship question into the 2020 census and issued orders that would have omitted undocumented individuals from apportionment counts. He also aimed to collect citizenship data through administrative means.
These directives were ultimately repealed when President Joe Biden, a Democrat, assumed office in January 2021, well before the release of the 2020 census data by the U.S. Census Bureau.
