A group of attorneys general are suing to stop illegal immigrants from diluting the voting power of American citizens.
Attorneys general from Louisiana, Kansas, Ohio, and West Virginia filed a lawsuit on Sunday to stop the Census Bureau from counting illegal immigrants in the census, which is used to apportion congressional seats and electoral votes. The suit alleges that then-President Joe Biden’s administration instructed the bureau to count illegal immigrants in the 2020 census and as a result, Ohio and West Virginia each lost a congressional seat and an electoral vote.
President Donald Trump signed a memo in July of 2020 that barred illegal immigrants to be counted in the census, but former President Joe Biden later reversed the policy. The size of a state’s population affects the number of congressional seats and electoral votes they have.
“After the 2020 Census, [Defendants] included illegal aliens and aliens holding temporary visas … in the census figures used for determining the apportionment of the House of Representatives and Electoral College votes,” the suit reads. “Due to this unlawful decision … Ohio lost one congressional seat and one electoral vote in the reapportionment conducted pursuant to the 2020 Census.”
The suit alleges, in part, that including illegal immigrants in the census robs citizens “of their rightful share of political representation, while systematically redistributing political power to states with high numbers of illegal aliens and nonimmigrant aliens” in violation of the 14th Amendment “and the constitutional principle of equal representation.”
Texas, which has struggled to curb illegal immigration due to the Biden administration’s constant efforts to hamstring their border security policies, gained on seat and one electoral vote while California managed to retain one seat and one vote “that it would have otherwise lost,” according to the suit. Meanwhile, the suit argues that Louisiana and Kansas will likely lose a seat and an electoral vote during the 2030 reapportionment if the Census Bureau continues counting illegal immigrants in the census.
The Census Bureau recently announced that “2.8 million people migrated to the United States between 2023 and 2024,” which was “significantly higher than our previous estimates.” Data shows that left-leaning states like California and New York would have lost more congressional seats via apportionment, but their domestic population losses were offset by international migration.
As The Federalist’s Beth Brelje reported, the data shows how “as U.S. citizens flee states with garbage leftist policies, the inclusion of noncitizens in census data allows those states to keep congressional seats because their population is propped up by illegal aliens.”
But some Democrats have made clear that noncitizens — including “migrants” — are electorally advantageous. Rep. Yvette Clark, D-N.Y., said during a 2021 hearing that her district “can absorb a significant number of these migrants” because “I need more people in my district, just for redistricting purposes.”
But as I previously wrote in these pages, if illegal immigrants can’t vote, “it would be hard to imagine that illegal immigrants should be empowered to dilute the weight of a vote by artificially expanding the population and increasing the representational advantage of one area while taking it away from another area that is populated by legal residents.”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
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