The language of the U.S. Constitution is unambiguous when it comes to the decennial census: The government is responsible for counting “all persons” in the United States as part of a process that’s conducted every “ten years.” There are no asterisks, there is no fine print. The first census was in 1790, and the count has been conducted every 10 years since, including during the pandemic in 2020.
As a matter of tradition, the census has not generally been a target for political schemes, but as is too often the case, things are quite different when the federal government is run by Donald Trump and his allies.
Last year, a variety of Republican officials began a public relations campaign against the 2020 count, which prompted the president to announce “immediate” work on a “new and highly accurate” census. This year, roughly coinciding with the administration’s relaxing of the agency’s standards on political interference, Trump and his team went so far as to use the Census Bureau to push easily discredited conspiracy theories about the president’s 2020 defeat.
But for those concerned about the politicization of the census, a proposal unveiled this week has pushed lingering fears to an unsettling level. The New York Times reported:
The Trump administration on Wednesday proposed to no longer count immigrants without green cards in the 2030 census or ask about race and ethnicity, part of an overhaul that would redefine who counts as a U.S. resident in the eyes of the federal government.
The sweeping measures would upend a process that helps determine the allotment of congressional seats, billions of dollars in federal funding and policies to address systemic disparities.
The proposed shift wouldn’t just exclude undocumented immigrants — the language of the Constitution notwithstanding — it would also remove from the national count those immigrants who are in the United States legally and have yet to secure green cards or citizenship.
What’s more, the Republican administration doesn’t merely want to exclude questions about race and ethnicity for the first time in American history, its new plan also wants to prohibit questions related to sexual orientation.
All of this may seem dry and technical, but if the proposed changes are implemented, the practical impact would be very real. After all, census data helps serve as the foundation for the nation’s civil rights laws. The more the White House succeeds in gutting the data, the easier it becomes to neuter democratic pillars like the Voting Rights Act.
At the same time, the more Team Trump is able to exclude parts of the country with larger immigrant populations, the more it can shift power and resources away from Democratic strongholds and toward red states.
As my MS NOW colleague Ja’han Jones noted when some of these proposed changes were first floated, “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 administration’s new model has not yet been formally approved, and spirited legal fights are inevitable as the process moves forward. Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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