7/21/2022 Trump Aimed to Erode Immigrant Representation With Census Citizenship Question, Documents ShowRead Now Donald Trump’s administration tried to add a citizenship question to the decennial census as part of an effort to alter the way the US House’s 435 seats are divvied up among the 50 states, a new tranche of documents reveals.
The documents, released by the House oversight committee on Wednesday, offer the clearest evidence to date that the Trump administration’s public justification for adding the question was made up. For years, the administration said that it needed to add a citizenship question to the decennial survey because better citizenship data was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The US supreme court ultimately blocked the Trump administration from adding the question in 2019, saying the rationale “seems to have been contrived”. “Today’s Committee memo pulls back the curtain on this shameful conduct and shows clearly how the Trump Administration secretly tried to manipulate the census for political gain while lying to the public and Congress about their goals,” Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat who chairs the oversight committee, said in a statement. Maloney recently introduced legislation that seeks to block future political interference at the census bureau. The decennial census has never asked a citizenship question and the US constitution says House seats shall be apportioned based on “the whole Number of free Persons”. Excluding non-citizens from the apportionment count, and therefore diminishing their political representation, has long been a goal of hard-right immigration groups. It would have clear political impact: California, Texas and Florida all would have lost out on a congressional seat if unauthorized immigrants were excluded from apportionment, a 2020 projection by Pew found. Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio all would have been able to hold on to an additional seat. Commerce secretary Wilbur Ross became interested in adding a citizenship question shortly after taking office in 2017. That year, James Uthmeier, a commerce department attorney, set out to analyze the legality of adding a citizenship question to the census at the request of Earl Comstock, a political appointee serving in a top policy role at the agency. In an undated memo released Wednesday, he concluded that doing so would not be lawful. The document makes it clear there is little evidence those who drafted the constitution wanted to exclude non-citizens from apportionment. “Their conscious choice not to except aliens from the directive to count the population suggests the Founders did not intend to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens for the ‘actual Enumeration’ used for apportionment,” Uthmeier wrote in the draft memo. “Over 200 years of precedent, along with substantially convincing historical and textual arguments suggest that citizenship data likely cannot be used for purposes of apportioning representatives,” he added. “Without opining on the wisdom of such an action, a citizenship status question may legally be included on the decennial census so long as the collected information is not used for apportionment.” But in subsequent drafts throughout 2017, Uthmeier and Comstock substantially changed that analysis. They revised the memo to suggest there was much more ambiguity into whether a citizenship question could be added for apportionment purposes. By August 2017, they turned in a memo to Ross suggesting there was a legal basis for adding the question for apportionment purposes. “There are bases for legal arguments that the Founding Fathers intended for the apportionment count to be based on legal inhabitants,” the new memo said. “If the Secretary decides that the question is needed for apportionment purposes, then it must be included on the decennial.” The memo was eventually hand-delivered to John Gore, a top official at the justice department (DoJ). Attached to the document was a handwritten note from Uthmeier nudging the justice department towards a rationale it could offer for adding the question. “Sec Ross has reviewed concerns and thinks DoJ would have a legitimate use of data for VRA purposes. Please let me know if you’d like to discuss,” Uthmeier wrote. In a postscript, he suggested Gore review a recent supreme court case that could help him make the case for why existing processes for counting citizens were insufficient. Gore subsequently ghostwrote a DoJ letter to the commerce department requesting that a citizenship question be added. The handwritten note is among the new evidence showing that commerce department officials tried to keep their work on adding a citizenship question quiet. WASHINGTON — Eighteen months into the Biden administration, immigration reform has stalled despite campaign promises to reform the system, with the most recent movement on immigration policy doled out by the U.S. Supreme Court and in lower federal courts. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Biden administration in a 5-4 decision on June 30 that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not violate federal immigration law when it moved to end the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, known as the Migrant Protection Protocols. It was a rare win for President Joe Biden amid a string of defeats at the end of the court’s term, including on abortion and climate change. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said during an interview with ABC News on Sunday last week that the agency is planning to end the Trump-era program that forced migrants seeking asylum to remain in Mexico while their cases were being processed through the U.S. immigration court system. But he said it will take time. “We need to wait until the Supreme Court’s decision is actually communicated to the lower courts, to the federal District Court and the Northern District of Texas, and, once that occurs, the District Court should lift its injunction that is preventing us from ending the program,” Mayorkas said. There are about 30,000 pending MPP cases, according to tracking by Syracuse University. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, criticized the Biden administration for moving to end the “Remain in Mexico” policy. “This decision will send yet another signal to the trafficking networks and cartels that America’s border is wide open,” Rubio said in a written statement. “President Biden’s reckless rhetoric and actions are encouraging illegal immigration and hurting our country.” Humanitarian InjusticeBut Sen. Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat, said in a statement that the end of the program “is the first step toward remedying years of humanitarian injustice.” “This dangerous, xenophobic policy established by the Trump administration has forced tens of thousands of vulnerable children, families, and other asylum seekers into unsafe conditions before their asylum requests can even be heard,” he said. Luján added that he is continuing to work with his colleagues in the Senate “to continue my career-long push to fix our broken immigration system.” Noting the horrifying discovery of 53 migrants who died in an abandoned tractor trailer in Texas while attempting to cross into the United States, Mayorkas called for Congress to pass immigration reform. He also defended the administration messaging on deterring migrants from crossing the U.S. border. Republicans have repeatedly attacked Biden on border policy. “Because the border has been a challenge for decades, ultimately Congress must pass legislation to once and for all fix our broken immigration system,” Mayorkas said during the ABC interview. Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was quick to blame Biden for the deaths of the migrants found in the tractor trailer. “These deaths are on Biden,” Abbott wrote on Twitter. “They are a result of his deadly open border policies.” While aboard Air Force One, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that “the fact of the matter is the border is closed, which is in part why you see people trying to make this dangerous journey using smuggling networks.” Dreamers’ Fate in the CourtsWithout congressional action, the nearly 825,000 undocumented people covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as Dreamers, remain in limbo as oral arguments took place in a lower court in Louisiana on Wednesday.
The program allows children who were brought to the country illegally to obtain documentation for work and allows them to remain in the country. Texas — in its lawsuit originally with Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, and West Virginia — argued that DACA placed an undue burden on the states and that the Obama administration didn’t follow proper procedures when implementing the program. The program was meant to be a temporary fix, until a path to citizenship for those children, who are now adults, could be put in place by Congress, but in June the program entered its 10th year. 6/28/2022 NYC Noncitizen Voting Law Struck Down by Staten Island Judge but Immigration Groups Vow AppealRead Now A Staten Island judge struck down a city law Monday that would give some noncitizen New Yorkers the right to vote in local elections, ruling that the expansion of electoral participation would violate the state constitution.
The so-called Local Law 11, which was adopted in January, would let green card holders and some immigrants on work and relief visas vote for mayor, City Council and other municipal-level positions. In a bid to stave off legal challenges, the Council crafted the legislation in such a way that it did not give noncitizens the right to vote in presidential, congressional and state-level elections — but Richmond County Supreme Court Justice Ralph Porzio ruled that the measure doesn’t pass constitutional muster regardless. Porzio stated that the city can’t give any noncitizen the right to vote due to a portion of the state constitution that holds that only “citizens” are eligible. “The New York State Constitution expressly states that citizens meeting the age and residency requirements are entitled to register and vote in elections,” Porzio wrote. He added, “Though voting is a right so many citizens take for granted, the City of New York cannot ‘obviate’ the restrictions imposed by the Constitution.” The decision came in response to a lawsuit brought by Staten Island Borough President Vito Fosella and other local Republicans, who celebrated the outcome Monday. “Today’s decision validates those of us who can read the plain English words of our state constitution and state statutes: Non-citizen voting in New York is illegal and shame on those who thought they could skirt the law for political gain,” said Staten Island Councilmember Joe Borelli, the Council’s GOP minority leader. Within minutes of Porzio’s ruling, supporters of Local Law 11 affirmed they plan to appeal to the state’s top court. Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, which will be involved in the planned appeal, said Porzio’s decision was “no surprise to us.” “The Republican opponents to the law specifically placed their lawsuit in a court they knew would be favorable to them,” Awawdeh said. “We remain firm in our certitude that municipal voting is legal and plan to support the appeal of this judge’s decision. We refuse to allow today’s verdict to further the disenfranchisement of Black and brown communities in New York City.” It’s unclear if the Council can take any additional legislative action to push back on Porzio’s ruling. Nonetheless, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Queens) said: “We are reviewing the ruling and exploring options for moving forward.” Border Patrol agents along the southern border recorded in May an all-time monthly high in apprehensions, processing migrants who entered the U.S. unlawfully over 222,000 times as part of a historic migration event, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) statistics released Wednesday show.
May's tally of migrant arrests surpassed the previous monthly record U.S. Border Patrol set in March 2000, when the agency recorded just over 220,000 apprehensions, according to historical government data for the past two decades. U.S. authorities also reported processing another 17,000 unauthorized migrants at official border ports of entry, where the Biden administration has been admitting some asylum-seekers deemed to be vulnerable so they can continue their immigration proceedings inside the country. The statistics published Wednesday show the unprecedented levels of migrant arrivals recorded along the U.S.-Mexico border over the past year under President Biden have only continued to intensify, posing major humanitarian, logistical and political challenges for his administration. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has processed migrants over 1.5 million times in fiscal year 2022, which will end at the end of September, a tally that is on track to exceed the record 1.7 migrant arrivals in fiscal year 2021. Republican lawmakers have said the unprecedented number of migrant arrests stem solely from Biden administration decisions to end some Trump-era restrictions. The administration and its allies, however, have said the record border arrivals are part of a broader displacement crisis fueled by pandemic-era economic woes, natural disasters, violence and political repression in parts of Latin America. May's historic tally of border arrests was, in part, driven by record arrivals of Colombian and Nicaraguan migrants, high numbers of Cuban asylum-seekers continuing to reach the Mexican border and a sharp increase in Haitians entering U.S. immigration custody. Arrivals of migrants from Brazil, Ecuador, Russia and other nations also increased. The soaring number of migrant arrivals has also been partly fueled by an unusually high rate of migrants crossing the border multiple times after being returned to Mexico. CBP said Wednesday that 25% of the migrant encounters in May involved migrants who had been previously stopped by the agency in the past year. Nearly 77,000 of the migrant encounters in May involved Mexicans; 25,348 involved Cubans; 21,382 involved Guatemalans; 19,491 involved Hondurans; 19,040 involved Colombians; 18,944 involved Nicaraguans; 10,418 involved Haitians; 8,955 involved Salvadorans; 5,118 involved Brazilians; 5,078 involved Venezuelans; 3,394 involved Russians and 3,045 involved Ecuadoreans. Approximately 100,000 of the CBP encounters in May led to migrants being expelled to Mexico or their home country without a chance to request asylum under a pandemic-era policy known as Title 42, agency data show. The Biden administration sought to end Title 42 last month, citing improving public health conditions, but a federal court required officials to continue the expulsions indefinitely. Decisions on whether to expel migrants under Title 42 depend on their nationality, age, the U.S. region where they are processed, diplomatic relations with their home countries and operational considerations by the government and the border-area organizations that shelter and assist asylum-seekers. In the past year, the Biden administration has used Title 42 mainly on single adults. In May, U.S. officials expelled single adults over 90,000 times, representing 90% of all expulsions that month. Another 74,550 single adults were processed under U.S. immigration law, which allows them to seek asylum. |