New York, NY-This morning, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) dodged a ruling on New York Immigration Coalition v. Trump, which challenged President Trump’s memo to exclude undocumented individuals from the 2020 Census count for the purposes of congressional apportionment. The New York Immigration Coalition, the ACLU, New York Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Texas, ACLU of Southern California, Arnold & Porter, and partner plaintiffs brought the lawsuit in July. Previously, three separate lower courts ruled this memo is illegal, with one ruling that it is unconstitutional. Today, however, SCOTUS deemed the lawsuit premature.
In response to SCOTUS declining to rule on the merits of President Trump’s memo, Murad Awawdeh and Rovika Rajkishun, interim Co-Executive Directors of the New York Immigration Coalition, issued the following statement.
“The Supreme Court’s ruling today changes nothing in our battle to defend the personhood of our communities. Should the Trump administration see this as an invitation to exclude our immigrant communities from the constitutionally mandated 2020 Census count of every ‘person’ in America, we will sue them in court, again. We refuse to let this White House deny our very personhood or cruelly withhold from New Yorkers the resources due to them that we need to rebuild in the wake of a global pandemic and economic recession.”