Birmingham, AL – MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund) is dismissing a cross-claim filed in federal court in Alabama against the Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Secretary of Commerce, and the Director of the Census Bureau.
The request follows an executive order signed by President Joseph Biden affirming that all persons in the United States shall be counted for purposes of the 2020 Census data used for reapportionment, as required by the Constitution.
MALDEF represents interveners in the Alabama lawsuit, which is still pending, in which the state seeks to require the subtraction of undocumented immigrants from the apportionment count used to reallocate seats in the House of Representatives among the 50 states. In 2019, MALDEF filed a cross-claim seeking to prevent the Trump administration from deciding to attempt to remove the estimated undocumented population from the apportionment count. Subsequently, in summer 2020, the Trump administration announced that it would seek to do exactly what the cross-claim anticipated. Under the Biden Administration directive issued this month, the federal government agrees to base apportionment on the total population count.
Please attribute the following statement on today’s voluntary dismissal to MALDEF President and General Counsel Thomas A. Saenz:
“While Mo Brooks and the state of Alabama continue their frivolous, political lawsuit to change the apportionment count – and while MALDEF will continue to contest that suit on behalf of interveners – the measure of sanity and constitutional fealty introduced by last week’s order from President Biden means that we no longer need to take on the federal government with respect to this issue. MALDEF looks forward to working together with federal government lawyers to defend the plain wording of the Constitution and its long-understood requirement that all persons be counted in allocating House seats.”
Find the dismissal HERE.