For the first time in four decades, the Census Bureau will miss the deadline for reporting the allocation numbers used to divide seats in Congress.
The missed deadline is likely to subvert President Trump’s plans to remove people living in the country without legal permission from the process.
Trump pushed for immigrants living in the U.S. without legal permission to be deducted from the final census count, which is used by the U.S. House of Representatives to decide how many members of the House each state receives – a measure that some theorized would benefit Republican lawmakers.
CENSUS LAUNCHED BY CHANGING DEADLINES, PRECISION CONCERNS
The 2020 census will also be used to help determine how to redraw district lines, a process that occurs every 10 years.
“This important process, which has been part of all ten-year censuses, is critical in producing data that can be used to allocate seats in the Chamber of Deputies across states,” the Census Bureau said in a statement on Wednesday. “The schedule for reporting this data is not static. The projected dates are variable.”
The December 31 deadline has yet to be met since it was first established in 1976, although officials say they expect it to be completed shortly after the New Year. But the bureau did not specify whether or not this would happen before President-elect Joe Biden took office on January 20, 2021.
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The Trump administration remained largely unclear about how they would calculate the census adjustment by removing certain immigrants, which could be attributed to the Supreme Court’s rejection of a lawsuit earlier this month that tried to block Trump’s plan.
Decision 6-3 concluded that “this case is full of contingencies and speculations that prevent judicial review”.
The lawsuit filed by the state of New York and the American Civil Liberties Union said that Trump’s policy would violate the Constitution and the Census Law by trying to undermine democratic states with the largest population of migrants, such as California, by reducing the number of allowed representatives .
According to the Census Law, the law states that seats in the Chamber must be based on the “total number of people in each state”.
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The president then sends Congress a population report for each state, along with the assigned number of districts in the Chamber. However, if the numbers are not sent by the Census Bureau until after January 20, President-elect Joe Biden will have control over the numbers and how they are interpreted.
“We continue to process the collected data and plan to provide a complete and accurate count of the state’s population for distribution in early 2021, as close to the legal deadline as possible,” the Bureau said on Wednesday.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.