Will a question about immigration status be on the 2030 census questionnaire?
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION in the past week dropped another hint about expected plans to cut unauthorized immigrants from the 2030 census count that determines political power and federal funding.
Yeah, I know. I wrote about this same topic last week involving a case in Missouri.
But the latest apparent warning reinforces, if there were any lingering doubts, that Trump and his immigration hardliners are plowing ahead with years-long efforts to exclude people in the United States illegally from the once-a-decade head count. The first Trump administration failed at these efforts, including trying to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census questionnaire, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
The latest tip-off comes from a court filing made late last week, this time in a Louisiana case. In it, DOJ lawyers reiterate that the Trump administration is going through the process of changing a rule dealing with “residence criteria” for the 2030 census. The criteria set out who is counted in the census, and the Census Bureau has said historically that immigrants are counted regardless of their legal status.
The numbers derived from the census determine how many congressional seats, and Electoral College votes, each state gets, as well as the distribution of $2.8 trillion in federal government spending.
In both the Louisiana and Missouri cases, Republican state attorneys general sued the U.S. government, trying to stop unauthorized immigrants from being tallied in the population count following a census. The Trump administration hasn’t yet publicly said how the criteria will change, but it’s latest litigation messages to the attorney generals in both the Louisiana and Missouri cases are, more or less, “Wait and see. I think you’re going to like this!”
“Defendants have taken concrete steps towards finalizing their policy position on issues that bear directly on the ones presented here,” Trump administration lawyers said Friday in a court filing in the Missouri case.
The U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment says “the whole number of persons in each state” should be counted for the numbers used for apportionment, and the Census Bureau for decades has interpreted that to include people living in the U.S. illegally.
To find out if someone is an unauthorized immigrant, though, the 2030 census questionnaire would have to ask about a respondents’ immigration status, which is unchartered territory. It likely would create confusion and reduce participation, noted Thomas Saenz, president of the civil rights group, MALDEF, during an online forum this week.
“This goes beyond the citizenship question,” Saenz said. “It would have some of the same effects as a citizenship question, which is to deter participation, create all kinds of confusion, and require the Bureau to engage in an unprecedented educational effort to try to get good data in response to such a question. All of that would be multiplied if there were a status question.”
Meanwhile, we wait.
The Trump administration hasn’t given any indication when it will publish the rule change.
