On Friday, the Supreme Court announced it would expedite an appeal by the Trump administration after a lower district court halted the administration’s plan to exclude people who are in the country illegally from the official apportionment count numbers used in allocating seats in the House of Representatives. Read a synopsis below.
- Oral arguments are scheduled for November 30, just one month before the statutory deadline for delivering the apportionment numbers to the president.
- It is not clear if the Census Bureau will be able to meet the December 31 deadline for delivering apportionment numbers, nor is it clear how it will estimate the number of undocumented immigrants since “administrative data sources don’t exist to give you a comprehensive picture for the undocumented populations,” according to one former census official interviewed by the Wash. Post.
- Last year, a Pew Research Center study found that excluding undocumented immigrants from the apportionment count could result in additional House seats going to Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio that would otherwise be assigned to California, Florida and Texas.
- The case is Trump v. New York. It is expected that Judge Amy Cony Barrett will be the ninth justice on the court in time for oral arguments.
Read coverage of the decision in the Washington Post, SCOTUSBlog, Politico, and Forbes.
