The Supreme Court on Friday decided it's too early to challenge President Trump's attempt to discount undocumented immigrants from the census.
Over the summer, Trump issued a dubiously legal executive order that would stop undocumented immigrants from counting toward congressional apportionment and federal funding determined by the census. Several states challenged the move in court, but on Friday, the Supreme Court handed Trump at least a temporary victory.
The court's conservatives — three of them appointed by Trump — united in a 6-3 decision, saying the states' challenge was "not suitable for adjudication at this time." The majority added that it expressed "no view on the merits of the constitutional and related statutory claims presented," merely that it was too early to make a decision. The court's liberal justices disagreed, saying "governing statutes, decades of historical practice, and uniform interpretations from all three branches of government demonstrate" that undocumented people can't be excluded from the count.
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The decision means Trump can try to remove undocumented people from the apportionment count, and that the opposition will have to sue again later if they'd like to stop the changes from taking effect. When first hearing the case in court, several conservative justices seemed skeptical of the Trump administration's arguments for discounting the undocumented.
The Trump administration has taken several steps to change the 2020 Census in ways that would likely depress the count of undocumented immigrants and marginalized groups, decreasing funding and congressional seats in left-leaning areas. That included adding a question of citizenship to the survey — a move Trump eventually abandoned.
