Supreme Court rejects Trump plan to add Census citizenship question. What that means now
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that president Trump’s administration can’t immediately carry through with a plan to ask every resident of the country about their citizenship status in the 2020 Census.
In a mixed ruling written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court concluded that the Commerce Department hadn’t adequately explained why it should be necessary to add a citizenship question to the Census form, a question that has not been asked since 1950.
The court opinion questioned whether the Commerce Department, which runs the Census, was acting on a request from the Department of Justice when it decided to add the question to the form.
“Altogether, the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the (Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross) gave for his decision,” the ruling said. “In the Secretary’s telling, Commerce was simply acting on a routine data request from another agency. Yet the materials before us indicate that Commerce went to great lengths to elicit the request from DOJ (or any other willing agency).
“We cannot ignore the disconnect between the decision made and the explanation given. ... We are not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free.”
The case was remanded back to a New York federal court for further proceedings, which means the citizenship question could surface again. But with the Census fast approaching — the first canvassing of residents is set to begin in August — there may not be time to add the question even if the legal questions get resolved.
Most Census forms will be distributed in March, in advance of the official Census day, April 1, 2020. But certain residents, among them college students in dorms, will be counted earlier.
The Trump administration’s plan to add the seemingly simple citizenship query to the 2020 Census form turned the upcoming headcount into the most debated in decades, triggering federal lawsuits and Congressional fights amid predictions of undercounts, and sending officials diving into their databases to see if their state might gain money and power — or lose it.
The stakes are high. The census count helps determine how federal funds from 55 major spending programs gets distributed to states, communities and households annually for the next decade. In 2016, those funds totaled about $883 billion.
About 4.4 percent of Kansas residents were non-citizens between 2013 and 2017, lower than the national average, Census figures show.
In 10 Kansas counties — Seward, Ford, Finney, Hamilton, Haskell, Grant, Wyandotte, Stevens, Wichita and Stanton — at least 10 percent of the population was not a citizen.
If one-tenth of Kansas’s 128,000 non-citizens skipped the Census due to the citizenship question, it would result in an undercount of about 13,000 residents.
The Census estimates come from the American Community Survey, or ACS, which the Census Bureau sends out every year to more than 3 million households. The ACS asks a wide variety of questions, including a question about citizenship.
About one in 12 foreign-born respondents nationwide filled out part of the ACS in 2017 but left blank the question about citizenship.
The federal government uses the Census to determine how to distribute billions of dollars in funds. When one state shrinks in proportion to the others, it stands to lose federal funding, and vice versa. A large undercount in particular states could hurt those states financially, to the benefit of states without an undercount.
According to the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy, the Census was the basis for allocating $6 billion in federal funding to Kansas during 2016. That comes out to about $2,100 per Kansas resident that year. Most of that money goes to low-income residents via programs like Medicaid and food stamps.
A skewed count also could tilt the balance on upcoming federal reapportioning of new House districts. California, the state with the highest estimated percentage of non-citizens, could lose a seat, and Texas may not get as many additional seats as expected. Montana may gain a seat.
That in turn affects Electoral College votes, which are based on each state’s count of House and Senate seats.
Kansas is not expected to gain or lose a seat in this Census go-around. But growth of other states has outpaced Kansas’ and the state now has four congressional representatives where once there were eight.
California and New York among others sued to block the administration from asking the question. A lower court loss in the New York lawsuit prompted Trump’s Commerce Department to petition the Supreme Court earlier in January.
Under the Trump plan, a person living alone would be asked eight questions on the Census form, including name, address, age and race. The final question will be: “Are you a citizen of the United States?”
Householders, such as parents, would be asked to answer a similar question for everyone living in their residence: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?”
Advocates for immigrants and non-citizens say the question is an attempt to intimidate those populations and keep them from filling out the Census, thus improving the chances of creating more political districts that benefit Republicans.
Lizette Escobedo, Census campaign director for the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, said she fears even Latinos here legally may duck the Census out of fear that immigration officials might use it against them.
“It is an attack on Latinos, on our immigrant community and on the democratic process,” Escobedo said.
Under Title 13 of the U.S. Code, the Census Bureau is required to keep respondent information confidential, and answers cannot be used against respondents in court or by government agencies such as immigration officials.
The Census Bureau will, however, be publishing data showing how many non-citizens live in each neighborhood.
Some non-citizens are unauthorized immigrants. Others are here legally as permanent residents with Green Cards, or with temporary work visas, or under other protected legal status.
The controversy stems from a decision announced by Ross in a March 26, 2018 memo.
The Commerce Secretary wrote that the federal government needs to know at the block level how many residents are citizens and how many are non-citizens in order to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act and “provide complete and accurate data” to protect minority population voting rights.
“While there is widespread belief among many parties that adding a citizenship question could reduce response rates, the Census Bureau’s analysis did not provide definitive, empirical support for that belief,” he wrote.
Nevertheless, he said, the bureau would put the citizenship question last, to reduce chances of impacting response rates.
In making the decision, Ross essentially bypassed the opinions of Census Bureau researchers. Chief scientist John Abowd, in a memo, had warned that adding the question “harms the quality of the Census count.”
In another analysis, Census Bureau economist J. David Brown said the citizenship question “would lead to lower self-response rates in households potentially containing noncitizens, resulting in higher fieldwork costs and a lower-quality population count.”
The American Statistical Association and other sociologists and demographers accused Ross of abandoning scientific principles. In an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, they wrote that adding a question without careful testing “is grossly inconsistent with both statutory mandates and professional norms.”
The controversy took a recent twist when Common Cause and the New York Times published reports indicating that a now-deceased Republican operative, Tom Hofeller, promoted the citizenship question to the Trump administration as a way to tilt redistricting in Republican favor.
The administration disputes that contention, but the discovery has prompted critics to reassert the belief that the citizenship question is a political move.
States with a lot of non-citizens tended to back Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Of the 20 states with the highest proportion of non-citizens, 15 backed Clinton and only five — Texas, Florida, Arizona, Utah and Georgia — backed Trump.
This story was originally published June 27, 2019 at 11:14 AM.
