Donald Trump ordered Tuesday not to count illegal aliens to establish the representativeness of the different states in the US Congress, relaunching his offensive against illegal immigration and the sensitive debate on citizenship. The American census, carried out every ten years, counts the entire population present in the territory, including the homeless, residents of retirement homes, undocumented immigrant workers or those living in mobile homes or without a postal address.
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Donald Trump said in a statement that he refused to "give parliamentary representation to foreigners who enter or stay in this country illegally, because that would create perverse incentives and undermine our system of government . " “Since we don't give political power to people who are here temporarily, we shouldn't give to people who shouldn't be here,” he said. The census operations, a titanic exercise in a country of 327 million inhabitants, condition the granting of 675 billion dollars in federal subsidies and determine the number of seats allocated to each state in the House of Representatives, according to its population.
The Republican billionaire, who has made the fight against illegal immigration a marker of his presidency, accused the "radical left" of wanting to erase the concept of nationality and "hide the number of illegal foreigners in our country". The subject also galvanizes the electoral base of the president, who will seek a new mandate in November. The powerful civil rights organization ACLU called the decision "unconstitutional" and promised to take legal action. The leader of the Democrats in Congress, Nancy Pelosi, accused Donald Trump of wanting to "once again instill fear and mistrust in vulnerable and traditionally under-counted communities".
The Supreme Court ruled unlawful last year the government's decision to ask for the nationality of census participants, a question that had not been asked for more than 60 years. This could have pushed between 1.6 and 6.5 million immigrants to abstain or to lie on the questionnaire for fear, especially among undocumented migrants, of being spotted, according to the census office. Between 10 and 11 million people resided illegally in the United States in 2017, according to an estimate by the American research center Pew.
