Census counting for immigration status back in SCOTUS

Posting this partly because I don’t entirely understand the ins and outs and hoping someone can explain better. It seems extremely alarming.

From what I can tell, the Trump admin is again in court trying to keep the census from counting illegal immigrants (despite the constitution being clear that all residents should be counted).

They’re apparently trying to alter the results after the fact to exclude illegal immigrants. I guess they’re going to use some kind of data to pare down the numbers? This seems like it should be obviously illegal and infeasible for multiple reasons.

So far the courts have ruled against Trump, and the SCOTUS seems to be very critical of the Trump admin in this case, but isn’t opting to immediately block the administrations actions. They’re asking a lot of questions about whether it’s practical for Trump to do this and whether the counts could be meaningfully affected.

Trump has already been successful in using the pandemic to shorten the effective time census workers were able to collect all the data. This case would be much more flimsy legally but I’m a bit worried that they’ll manage to find some way to change the district numbers.

Would be interesting to see if Barrett is the key deciding swing justice. Although I could easily see Gorsuch and Kavanaugh jumping over to the liberals on this one. Roberts is certainly not going to take Trump’s side, so the conservative camp couldn’t afford any more defections.

The fact that this is even being considered tells us how far to the right the Court has swung.

Guess we will see who is a “true” originalist, versus those that are only originalists when it is convenient.