NEW YORK (Reuters) – A panel of judges on Thursday declared unlawful a recent directive from President Donald Trump to exclude people who are in the United States illegally from representation when apportioning congressional seats.
The decision by a three-judge panel, which could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, is a victory for the 38 states, cities and counties, plus several immigrants rights nonprofits, that sued over Trump’s July 21 directive.
The mostly Democratic-leaning plaintiffs, led by New York state, accused Trump of having an “xenophobic” purpose in pushing a directive that reflected “discriminatory animus” toward Hispanics and other immigrant communities. They said the Republican president’s directive violated the U.S. Constitution’s requirement to count the “whole number of persons in each state.”
In its 86-page decision, the panel said federal law requires that one set of numbers be used to count the number of people in the country for purposes of the census and apportionment.
It said that so long as they resided in the United States, “illegal aliens qualify as ‘persons in’ a ‘state'” who must be counted.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Sandra Maler and Leslie Adler)
