Losing legal battles over the census, Trump could win the political war

(Reuters) – The Trump administration has few realistic options for dealing with a citizenship issue in next year's census, but keeping this question in public view could still cause undercoverage areas with a democratic tendency, legal and political experts told Reuters. .

Constant media coverage linking census and citizenship forms could deter undocumented immigrants from reacting and rallying US President Donald Trump's base to participate, they said. This, in turn, would help redraw constituencies across the country in favor of his Republican party, encouraging the president to pursue a legal battle that he has little chance of winning.

The last meeting took place on Sunday night when the US Justice Department set up a new team of lawyers to handle the latest litigation litigation that has been going on for more than a year.

"Even if the question is (solved), if people tweet as if this could be a real possibility, it still fears and depresses the count," said Thomas Wolf, a Brennan census lawyer Center. for justice.

The US Constitution requires the government to count all residents – regardless of their legal status – every 10 years. The information gathered is used as a basis for voting cards and distributing some $ 800 billion in federal funds each year.

It is illegal for the Census Bureau to share information about people with law enforcement or immigration authorities. But the idea of ​​asking residents for citizenship status nonetheless fueled fears that the survey would become a tool for the Trump Administration's radical immigration policies.

The president and his allies said that it was important to know the citizenship status and called the issue a subject that should not cause controversy.

"It is so important to our country that the very simple and fundamental question" Are you a citizen of the United States? "May be asked in the 2020 census," tweeted the president on July 4th.

A Reuters poll earlier this year also found that 66 percent of Americans favored inclusion.

Demographers, advocacy groups, businesses and even the Census Bureau staff said that the citizenship issue threatened to undermine the survey.

Communities with large immigrant and Latin American populations may have a low response rate. The researchers estimated that more than 4 million people out of a total population of about 330 million people in the United States might not participate.

This would benefit non-Hispanic whites, an essential part of Trump's support, and would help Republicans get seats in Congress and in state legislatures, critics said.

The question seemed dead in June, when the Supreme Court blocked it, claiming that the administration had given an "artificial" justification for its inclusion.

However, the high court left open the possibility that the administration could offer a plausible justification. Lawyers from the Justice Ministry said Friday that they were exploring other explanations. Trump also said that he could try to force him to participate in the investigation by a decree.

The legal experts immediately slapped the ideas. It will be difficult to convince judges that a new explanation is not so artificial and that a decree would not overrule the Supreme Court's decision or overturn other court decisions blocking the citizenship issue, did they declared.

"An executive order is no talisman," said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of MALDEF, a Latino rights group that is pursuing one of the lawsuits against the administration. "Our government is not a dictatorship."

Trump also said Friday that although the census forms are already printed, the government could later produce "an addendum".

It is unclear how this could work, but census experts said it would be an unprecedented disruption of the process that has been going on for years.

"Any suggestion that the Census Bureau could add an extra piece of paper with an additional question to an enumeration that it has been literally planning for a decade bears witness to a staggering ignorance about what it takes to achieve a census, "said Terri Ann Lowenthal, census consultant.

An addendum would also be likely to be challenged in court for violating various administrative laws.

On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a motion to prevent the citizenship issue from being added.

Meanwhile, attention around the legal debacle may already be hurting the census and helping Trump reach its goals, said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

"The more he has this conversation, the more difficult it is to get a precise census count," she said.