Biden’s Day One Executive Orders - All Residents to Be Counted
President Trump created a policy that altered the census count by excluding unauthorized immigrants. President Biden, in one of his first executive actions, reversed that policy. The change allows the U.S. census to follow more than two centuries of precedent in determining representation in the Electoral College and in Congress.
The executive order is called “Executive Order on Ensuring a Lawful and Accurate Enumeration and Apportionment Pursuant to the Decennial Census.” The president signed the order on January 20, 2021. This order allows the taking of census to align with the language of the 14th Amendment, which says the state population numbers must include the “whole number of persons in each state.”
The state counts are used once every ten years to determine each state’s number of electoral votes and seats in the House of Representatives. The first census took place in 1790, and since that time, no residents have ever been omitted because of their status as immigrants.
Trump had also issued an executive order in July 2019 to use government records to produce citizenship data. Biden rescinded that order, as well. Still standing, however, are directives issued by former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross that require the Census Bureau to use their records to generate block-level data about the citizenship status of every adult in the country. It is unknown what will happen to the records and data the bureau has complied.
This project is currently facing a federal lawsuit. Trump’s push to exclude unauthorized immigrants from numbers for reapportioning Congress provoked multiple lawsuits. Susan Rice, Biden’s domestic policy adviser, says Trump’s plan “violates the Constitution and the Census Act and is inconsistent with our nation’s history and our commitment to representative democracy.”
Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that deciding whether Trump could legally subtract unauthorized immigrants from census numbers was “premature.” The SCOTUS conservative majority wrote in their opinion that the case was “riddled with contingencies and speculation.”
Days before Justice Department attorneys confirmed that the administration had officially given up on Trump’s bid for this information last week, career officials at the Census Bureau stopped trying to produce the requested figures, which they said were likely to be inaccurate and incomplete.
Biden also proposed an eight-year path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The bill will be introduced in Congress by Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ). This legislation would make millions of undocumented immigrants eligible for permanent U.S. residency after five years and eligible to apply for citizenship three years later. Applicants would have had to enter the U.S. prior to January 2, 2021.
Biden’s repeal of Trump’s census order had a perhaps unexpected side effect. In Texas, the nearly two million unauthorized immigrant residents may bring in billions of federal dollars over the next decade, and may add a seat or two in the House of Representatives. Said state Rep. Phil King, R-TX, “Don’t get me wrong, I support President Trump and I appreciate what he was trying to do, but this is good for Texas. It probably means the difference between getting one and three new congressional seats.”
With all the immigrants included, Texas may end up with 39 or 40 seats in the House in 2022, up from the 36 seats it’s had for the last decade.
Due to the Trump administration’s last-minute schedule changes and the pandemic, the Census Bureau has not released the new figures yet. They are still running quality checks. The earliest the results can be expected is March 6.
Census advocates are trying to get Biden to give them extensions to the reporting deadlines, as the agency had to postpone in-person counting due to COVID-19. Rice told reporters last week, “President Biden will ensure that the Census Bureau has time to complete an accurate population count for each state.”
