Trump Aimed to Erode Immigrant Representation With Census Citizenship Question, Documents Show7/21/2022
Donald Trump’s administration tried to add a citizenship question to the decennial census as part of an effort to alter the way the US House’s 435 seats are divvied up among the 50 states, a new tranche of documents reveals.
The documents, released by the House oversight committee on Wednesday, offer the clearest evidence to date that the Trump administration’s public justification for adding the question was made up. For years, the administration said that it needed to add a citizenship question to the decennial survey because better citizenship data was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The US supreme court ultimately blocked the Trump administration from adding the question in 2019, saying the rationale “seems to have been contrived”. “Today’s Committee memo pulls back the curtain on this shameful conduct and shows clearly how the Trump Administration secretly tried to manipulate the census for political gain while lying to the public and Congress about their goals,” Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat who chairs the oversight committee, said in a statement. Maloney recently introduced legislation that seeks to block future political interference at the census bureau. The decennial census has never asked a citizenship question and the US constitution says House seats shall be apportioned based on “the whole Number of free Persons”. Excluding non-citizens from the apportionment count, and therefore diminishing their political representation, has long been a goal of hard-right immigration groups. It would have clear political impact: California, Texas and Florida all would have lost out on a congressional seat if unauthorized immigrants were excluded from apportionment, a 2020 projection by Pew found. Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio all would have been able to hold on to an additional seat. Commerce secretary Wilbur Ross became interested in adding a citizenship question shortly after taking office in 2017. That year, James Uthmeier, a commerce department attorney, set out to analyze the legality of adding a citizenship question to the census at the request of Earl Comstock, a political appointee serving in a top policy role at the agency. In an undated memo released Wednesday, he concluded that doing so would not be lawful. The document makes it clear there is little evidence those who drafted the constitution wanted to exclude non-citizens from apportionment. “Their conscious choice not to except aliens from the directive to count the population suggests the Founders did not intend to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens for the ‘actual Enumeration’ used for apportionment,” Uthmeier wrote in the draft memo. “Over 200 years of precedent, along with substantially convincing historical and textual arguments suggest that citizenship data likely cannot be used for purposes of apportioning representatives,” he added. “Without opining on the wisdom of such an action, a citizenship status question may legally be included on the decennial census so long as the collected information is not used for apportionment.” But in subsequent drafts throughout 2017, Uthmeier and Comstock substantially changed that analysis. They revised the memo to suggest there was much more ambiguity into whether a citizenship question could be added for apportionment purposes. By August 2017, they turned in a memo to Ross suggesting there was a legal basis for adding the question for apportionment purposes. “There are bases for legal arguments that the Founding Fathers intended for the apportionment count to be based on legal inhabitants,” the new memo said. “If the Secretary decides that the question is needed for apportionment purposes, then it must be included on the decennial.” The memo was eventually hand-delivered to John Gore, a top official at the justice department (DoJ). Attached to the document was a handwritten note from Uthmeier nudging the justice department towards a rationale it could offer for adding the question. “Sec Ross has reviewed concerns and thinks DoJ would have a legitimate use of data for VRA purposes. Please let me know if you’d like to discuss,” Uthmeier wrote. In a postscript, he suggested Gore review a recent supreme court case that could help him make the case for why existing processes for counting citizens were insufficient. Gore subsequently ghostwrote a DoJ letter to the commerce department requesting that a citizenship question be added. The handwritten note is among the new evidence showing that commerce department officials tried to keep their work on adding a citizenship question quiet. Canadian citizens and permanent residents who are in a relationship with a foreign national may sponsor that person to join them in Canada and become a permanent resident. You may sponsor your spouse, common-law partner or conjugal partner. There are two main options to choose from when sponsoring your spouse or partner: Outland Sponsorship and Inland Sponsorship. Outland SponsorshipOutland sponsorship is an option for couples who are not living together in Canada. This application is for foreign nationals who are residing abroad and are to be sponsored by their Canadian spouse or partner. If your spouse or partner is unable to apply from inside Canada or does not legally live in Canada at the time of the application, outland sponsorship is likely the only option available. To be eligible to sponsor a spouse or partner under the Outland application category, the sponsor and sponsored person must meet the following criteria:
It is important to note that if you are in a conjugal relationship, the Outland Sponsorship application is the only option available to you as conjugal relationships are not eligible under Inland Sponsorship. If the sponsored persons’ work or personal situation requires them to travel outside the country, Outland Sponsorship may be the better option as it allows for travel to and from Canada during the application process. Inland SponsorshipInland sponsorship is an option for couples who are living together in Canada. This application is for foreign spouses or partners who have valid temporary status in Canada, either as a worker, student or visitor. The sponsored person will be able to continue to live, work or study in Canada while the inland sponsorship application is being processed.
To be eligible to sponsor a spouse or partner under the Inland application category, the sponsor and sponsored person must meet the following criteria:
The union for immigration judges has asked the Justice Department to revisit its ouster of several judges hired during the Trump administration, questioning whether the firings were illegal — and calling them unseemly at the very least.
Three judges had each received satisfactory performance evaluations during their two-year probationary periods. That made the decision by the Executive Office for Immigration Review to kick them out of their jobs at the end of probation rather than convert them to permanent positions all the more striking, the National Association of Immigration Judges said in its letter. Ordering the judges out of their offices without a chance to collect their belongings was “unprofessional and unbefitting,” the union said. “They deserved better,” Mimi Tsankov and Samuel B. Cole, the union’s president and executive vice president, wrote to David Neal, director of EOIR, in a letter obtained by The Washington Times. The letter is dated June 23, days after The Times reported on the firings as the latest in a series of politically charged upheavals under the Biden team at EOIR, which runs the immigration courts. Four of the top officials at the agency have been ushered out of their posts, in addition to what one source said has been more than a half dozen immigration judges. One ousted judge, Matthew O’Brien, told The Times that his termination letter didn’t give any real justification and only vaguely referred to “performance and/or conduct” as the reason he was being let go. A Justice Department source said Mr. O’Brien’s supervisor, who worked for an immigrant rights group until he was hired less than a year ago at EOIR, recommended Mr. O’Brien’s termination. Mr. O’Brien served for years at the Homeland Security Department and used to work at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for stricter immigration controls. “There was both a clear political motivation and a conflict of interest for her action, and the agency ignored it,” the department official said. Activist immigration lawyers also took credit for getting Mr. O’Brien ousted. After news of his departure leaked, some took to Twitter to boast. They said they had orchestrated a campaign to “crowdsource” complaints about Mr. O’Brien to feed to his supervisors. One lawyer said his firm drafted a recusal motion against Mr. O’Brien and circulated it to immigration lawyers who practiced in the immigration court based in Arlington, Virginia, where Mr. O’Brien was stationed. EOIR declined to comment for this article. In their letter, the union leaders asked Mr. Neal to review the firings to determine whether they were “in full compliance with the law.” They said the way the judges were axed is having “a substantial and negative effect on judge morale” across the country. In a statement to The Times, Ms. Tsankov said: “Politics have no place in the immigration courts. Reports that judges were removed for political reasons should concern all of us.” She said the Federal Labor Relations Authority decertified the union during the Trump administration, so it doesn’t even have a legal right to step in and defend the ousted judges. Mr. O’Brien told The Times in an earlier interview that his ouster was part of “court-packing on steroids” as the Biden administration tossed aside judges it didn’t like and sought to replace them with more ideologically aligned picks with the help of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Border Patrol agents along the southern border recorded in May an all-time monthly high in apprehensions, processing migrants who entered the U.S. unlawfully over 222,000 times as part of a historic migration event, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) statistics released Wednesday show. May's tally of migrant arrests surpassed the previous monthly record U.S. Border Patrol set in March 2000, when the agency recorded just over 220,000 apprehensions, according to historical government data for the past two decades. U.S. authorities also reported processing another 17,000 unauthorized migrants at official border ports of entry, where the Biden administration has been admitting some asylum-seekers deemed to be vulnerable so they can continue their immigration proceedings inside the country. The statistics published Wednesday show the unprecedented levels of migrant arrivals recorded along the U.S.-Mexico border over the past year under President Biden have only continued to intensify, posing major humanitarian, logistical and political challenges for his administration.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has processed migrants over 1.5 million times in fiscal year 2022, which will end at the end of September, a tally that is on track to exceed the record 1.7 migrant arrivals in fiscal year 2021. Republican lawmakers have said the unprecedented number of migrant arrests stem solely from Biden administration decisions to end some Trump-era restrictions. The administration and its allies, however, have said the record border arrivals are part of a broader displacement crisis fueled by pandemic-era economic woes, natural disasters, violence and political repression in parts of Latin America. May's historic tally of border arrests was, in part, driven by record arrivals of Colombian and Nicaraguan migrants, high numbers of Cuban asylum-seekers continuing to reach the Mexican border and a sharp increase in Haitians entering U.S. immigration custody. Arrivals of migrants from Brazil, Ecuador, Russia and other nations also increased. The soaring number of migrant arrivals has also been partly fueled by an unusually high rate of migrants crossing the border multiple times after being returned to Mexico. CBP said Wednesday that 25% of the migrant encounters in May involved migrants who had been previously stopped by the agency in the past year. Nearly 77,000 of the migrant encounters in May involved Mexicans; 25,348 involved Cubans; 21,382 involved Guatemalans; 19,491 involved Hondurans; 19,040 involved Colombians; 18,944 involved Nicaraguans; 10,418 involved Haitians; 8,955 involved Salvadorans; 5,118 involved Brazilians; 5,078 involved Venezuelans; 3,394 involved Russians and 3,045 involved Ecuadoreans. Approximately 100,000 of the CBP encounters in May led to migrants being expelled to Mexico or their home country without a chance to request asylum under a pandemic-era policy known as Title 42, agency data show. The Biden administration sought to end Title 42 last month, citing improving public health conditions, but a federal court required officials to continue the expulsions indefinitely. Decisions on whether to expel migrants under Title 42 depend on their nationality, age, the U.S. region where they are processed, diplomatic relations with their home countries and operational considerations by the government and the border-area organizations that shelter and assist asylum-seekers. In the past year, the Biden administration has used Title 42 mainly on single adults. In May, U.S. officials expelled single adults over 90,000 times, representing 90% of all expulsions that month. Another 74,550 single adults were processed under U.S. immigration law, which allows them to seek asylum. |