Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has joined Ohio along with three other states in a federal lawsuit that seeks to prevent certain immigrants from being counted in the U.S. census, including those in the country illegally and those on momentary visas.
The case was filed in U.S. District Court on Jan. 17 and also involves the attorneys general of Louisiana, West Virginia and Kansas.
Yost and other state legal chiefs – filing a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Census Bureau (an agency within the Commerce Department) – say: principle of residence which allows foreigners living in the U.S. to be counted in the decennial census, produced 2020 Census data that “included illegal aliens and aliens on temporary visas” to determine the apportionment for U.S. House of Representatives and Electoral College representative districts.
Since the first U.S. census in 1790, the census has counted both citizens and non-citizens, and none has omitted residents based on immigration status. For decades, the tough Federation for American Immigration Reform is fighting to prevent it, and President Donald Trump tried to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the census during his first administration.
Redistricting is the process of allocating congressional seats among states based on census data, which then leads to congressional redistricting, which draws district boundaries for those representatives.
The state’s resident counting rules state that foreign nationals living in the U.S. are counted by their “U.S. domicile where they live and sleep most of the time.”
“As a result of this unlawful decision, the Ohio plaintiff lost one congressional seat and one electoral vote as a result of reapportionment based on the 2020 Census,” the lawsuit states. “This congressional seat and electoral votes were transferred to a state with a larger illegal alien and nonimmigrant population.”
The lawsuit states claim that by allowing counting under the “residency rule,” the Census Bureau violates the 14th Amendment, “thereby robbing the people of the Lawsuit States of their fair share of political representation by systematically redistributing power to states with vast number of illegal aliens and nonimmigrant aliens.”
“The inclusion of illegal aliens in the apportionment basis is inconsistent with the text of the Fourteenth Amendment because illegal aliens and nonimmigrants are not residents of the states,” the attorney general said.
Ohio’s redistricting process following the 2020 census has been arduous.
The Ohio Redistricting Commission adopted two different congressional maps, both of which were found unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court. However, the most recently adopted map remained energetic and was the map used in the last two election cycles.
The map will be ready for redrawing this year because it was not adopted by bilateral agreement. Ohio’s redistricting law states that a map adopted without a bipartisan agreement lasts only four years, while a bipartisan agreement allows a map to last 10 years.
Lawmakers have until the end of September to agree on the redrawn map. If lawmakers as a whole cannot agree and adopt a map, the decision again rests with the government Ohio Redistricting Commission adopting the map because an attempt to eliminate the commission and introduce a citizen-led process failed in the November general election.
West Virginia also lost its congressional seat and Electoral College votes, according to the fresh lawsuit, and if West Virginia residents are allowed to remain in the state illegally or temporarily, “each of the other plaintiff states would likely lose their congressional seats and votes on redistribution for 2030.”
California, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York were listed as other states that lost a U.S. House seat and Electoral College votes, although they are not parties to the lawsuit. States that gained a seat in the House of Representatives included Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Montana and Oregon, as well as Texas, which gained two seats.
The states targeted in the lawsuit also argue that they are being deprived of federal funds that could have been provided to them based on population if census data changed. The lawsuit cites 2021 data from the Pew Research Center, which shows that illegal immigrants in Ohio constitute 1% of the total population.
Attorneys general harken back to the nation’s origins and the Reconstruction era when interpreting the constitutional obligation to count the population in each state.
The lawsuit argues that the Founding Fathers and others in the years following the Civil War understood the phrase “persons in every state” to mean “limited to citizens of the United States and resident aliens who were lawfully admitted to the body politic established by “Constitution”
“The representatives and electors represent only the self-governing people of the United States, its descendants, and those aliens whom the people of the United States have elected to admit into the political community created by the Constitution through legal immigration, granting them lawful permanent resident status,” the lawyers said.
Ohio, Louisiana, West Virginia and Kansas asked the court to strike down the residency rule for counting undocumented immigrants or people on momentary visas in the decennial census and to order the Census Bureau and the Department of Commerce to include citizenship questions on the 2030 Census.
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