Trump v. New York

Under the actual-enumeration provision in Article I of United States Constitution, the federal government must perform a census every 10 years to count the entire population living in the country. This census data is used, in part, to determine how the seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned, meaning divided, among the states. Thus, the census data impacts how many seats each state receives in the House of Representatives for the next 10 years. In 2020, President Trump (defendant) issued a memorandum directing the secretary of commerce (secretary) (defendant) to gather information for the purpose of allowing the president to exclude any immigrants without a lawful status from the population count used for apportionment. Several states and organizations (collectively, the challengers) (plaintiffs) sued the president, the secretary, and the Census Bureau (collectively, the executive branch) (defendants), arguing that the activity ordered in the memo—excluding immigrants without a lawful status from the count—violated the constitutional census directive as well as other laws. The challengers alleged that the legal violations were causing two types of harm. First, the memo’s mere existence created a chilling effect that made some members of the population afraid to respond to census inquiries and therefore reduced the accuracy of the census data. Second, actual implementation of the unlawful counting method could happen only through even more unlawful estimation procedures and would improperly reduce the challengers’ representation in Congress and the challengers’ federal funding. A three-judge district-court panel held that the challengers had standing and that the exclusion directed by the memo was unlawful. The district court then issued an injunction preventing the executive branch from engaging in the unlawful use directed in the memo. The executive branch appealed to the United States Supreme Court.