It is the result of a Supreme Court case a decade or so ago and the SC ruled illegals will be included in the Census and included in the House apportionment. I fully understand all the arguments against it, but they are mute from a practical point of view. It is not just an administrative decision, it is the law.
The question Trump wanted was for informational purposes. The Dems feared that some illegals would not participate in fear, but there was never a question to include them or not include them in the population count and apportionment.
The April 2016 count has no relation to the original SC case and is meaningless to the apportionment process. The original case is very operative. Nothing has changed.
The census website FAQ just states the current policy. It doesn’t say anything about the underlying law.
The key piece of missing info here would seem to be the SCOTUS ruling from a decade or so ago — the one that said whether the census CAN include illegals or MUST include them.
I do see this in one of the PDF reports at the census site:
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Were undocumented residents in the 50 states included in the 2010 Census apportionment population counts?
All people (citizens and noncitizens) with a usual residence in one of the 50 states were included in the 2010 Census and thus in the apportionment counts. This has been true since the first census
in 1790.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2011/dec/c2010br-08.html
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Apparently illegals have always been counted. So, at the very least, using a method that doesn’t count illegals would be a big departure from tradition. To me this makes it unlikely to happen. OTOH Trump is a nontraditional kind of guy. If he sees an opening in the law, I could see him going for it.
It is the result of a Supreme Court case a decade or so ago and the SC ruled illegals will be included in the Census and included in the House apportionment.