Louisiana v. Department of Commerce
Case Summary
On January 27, 2025, the National Redistricting Foundation (NRF) supported a group of voters from California and Texas (the “Proposed Intervenor-Defendants”) in moving to intervene in Louisiana v. Dept. of Commerce as defendants. The NRF-supported Proposed Intervenor-Defendants seek to protect their congressional and Electoral College representation as California and Texas voters from a challenge by conservative plaintiff states to a fair and accurate Census count, as well as fair congressional representation.
Days before the inauguration of the second Trump Administration, Louisiana, Kansas, Ohio, and West Virginia filed suit to force the Census Bureau to exclude from apportionment people in the United States without documented legal status and people in the United States on temporary visas. This extraordinary request challenges the longstanding practice of including everyone in the census count.
Prior to the completion of the briefing on the motions to intervene by the NRF-supported Proposed Intervenor-Defendants and by other organizations, the U.S. Department of Justice sought a 60-day stay of all deadlines “to confer about the issues raised in this litigation with new leadership at the Department of Commerce.” The U.S. district court granted the stay and struck the NRF-supported Proposed Intervenor-Defendants’ and other organizations’ motions to intervene, opining that such motions could be refiled when the stay is lifted. The plaintiff states and the DOJ defendants—the only parties currently in the case—jointly agreed to multiple 60-day extensions of the stay. On December 17, 2025, however, the plaintiff states no longer agreed that the case should remain stayed. The DOJ defendants encouraged the court to continue to stay the case because the Department of Commerce was “actively preparing to promulgate the residence criteria and residence situations for the 2030 Census in the next few months,” which could “potentially lead to the dismissal of the matter.”
On March 10, 2026, the court denied the plaintiff states’ request to lift the stay and ordered the parties to appear at an in-person status conference on November 10, 2026, to reassess the merits of the stay if the court had not yet lifted it prior to that date.
Most recently, the DOJ defendants issued a status report on May 11, 2026, which provided that the Department of Commerce was “continuing to prepare to promulgate the residence criteria and residence situations for the 2030 Census in the coming months.”
The defendants will provide another status report on July 10, 2026.
Case Documents
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