The Trump administration’s latest efforts to distort the 2030 U.S. census — and thus the apportionment of congressional seats and federal resources — in favor of white conservatives are laid bare in a new memo.
Activists and even some lawmakers, like Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, have spotlighted various ways Republicans have used the current rules around the census and congressional apportionment to give largely white, conservative areas more political power. During his first term, President Donald Trump and his appointees tried to place their thumb on the scale in part by seeking to include a citizenship question on the census, a xenophobic gambit that was ultimately struck down in court. As part of their efforts to relegate immigrants to a permanent underclass, Republicans have also argued that the decennial census should not even count various classes of immigrants, including undocumented ones.
And Talking Points Memo got its hands on a draft document that proposes new rules for the census to collect certain data, if it collects it at all. According to TPM:
The proposed rule, under consideration by the Department of Commerce, attempts two things: to exclude broad categories of noncitizens from the count in the 2030 Census, and to eliminate the collection of race and ethnicity data for the first time since 1790.
Here’s how the outlet described the new rules around counting noncitizens:
Trump’s Census Bureau wants to redefine how the census tracks where people live. In 2020, a person’s “usual residence” was “the place where they live and sleep most of the time.” To exclude some noncitizens, the draft reviewed by TPM narrows the definition of a person’s usual residence to something “consistent with, and evidenced by, their tax records.” Lawful permanent residents, “approved asylees” and “approved refugees” would still be counted at their defined U.S. residence. “All other citizens of foreign countries,” the draft states, would not be counted at all. That would exclude undocumented immigrants, but also foreign students, H1-B visa holders, and many others from the count.
And here’s the potential impact of stopping the collection of race and ethnicity data, according to TPM:
In prohibiting the collection of race and ethnicity data, the Census Bureau regulation proposal cuts off a key source of data that plaintiffs can use to make claims of racial voter dilution under the Voting Rights Act. After the Supreme Court gutted the VRA in April, groups have to prove intent to discriminate to prove that their votes have been illegally diluted. Depriving the public of reliable data about where racial groups live would make winning those claims nearly impossible, advocates said. The White House and Department of Commerce didn’t return repeated requests for comment.
These are the kinds of white supremacist proposals that are unsurprising from an administration — led by a man whose rhetoric has echoed Southern segregationists from the Jim Crow era — that has promoted white supremacist propaganda and enacted policies similar to those endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan back in the day.
The tactic at play here is a familiar one. Willful ignorance, particularly the politicization and obfuscation of federal data, seems the Trump administration’s modus operandi for allowing discrimination to flourish. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which had a reputation for fighting workplace discrimination before Trump’s handpicked appointee took the helm, last month voted to end its collection of corporate race and gender data. The move fueled concerns that it may leave victims of corporate discrimination with little recourse.
The Trump administration’s effort to influence the Bureau of Labor Statistics has fueled similar concerns that the Trump appointee in charge of the agency could manipulate or withhold data in a way that it becomes, as one activist told me, a “tool of sexism.”
Put another way, the administration has given no reason to believe that its efforts to collect less data or to exclude people have any purpose but the exercise of sheer power or discrimination. And there’s no reason to believe the census’ proposed rule is any different.
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