THAT CITIZENSHIP QUESTION ON THE CENSUS FORMS
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
JUNE 13, 2018


THE CITIZENSHIP QUESTION

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/391527-census-bureau-official-warned-in-memo-against-adding-citizenship
Census Bureau’s chief scientist warned secretary in memo against adding citizenship question
BY JACQUELINE THOMSEN - 06/10/18 07:55 AM EDT

PHOTOGRAPH -- Wilbur Ross © Greg Nash

An internal memo from the chief scientist of the U.S. Census Bureau warned Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross against adding a question on citizenship to the 2020 census.

John Abowd, the agency’s chief scientist and associate director for research and methodology, wrote in the January memo that adding a citizenship question would be "very costly, harms the quality of the census count, and would use substantially less accurate citizenship status data than are available from administrative sources."

The document also states that adding the questions would create "major potential quality and cost disruptions" for the 2020 census.

The memo does say that the cost of adding the question would be minimal and would create a "direct measure of self-reported citizenship for the whole population."

However, Abowd’s overall argument is against adding the question, stating that "citizenship status is misreported at a very high rate for non-citizens."

CNN reported that Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released the internal memo on Saturday.

Ross said in a statement that the "the administrative record" shows that the administration strongly considered the “legal, policy, and program considerations prior to reinstating the citizenship question."

“I am confident that after months of review and consideration, this administrative record proves that the return of the citizenship question to the Decennial Census is the right move that will allow our country to have the most complete and accurate census information available,” Ross said in the statement.

Other documents released by the Justice Department on Friday show that anti-illegal immigration advocates, including Kansas secretary of state and former head of President Trump’s since-disbanded voter fraud commission Kris Kobach, advocated for the citizenship question.

Kobach wrote in a July 2017 email to a Ross aide that he had lobbied for the question “on the direction of Steve Bannon,” who was serving as White House chief strategist at the time, The New York Times reported.

The Trump administration faced major pushback after it announced earlier this year that it would add the question on citizenship to the 2020 census.

Attorneys general in several states sued almost immediately after the announcement, arguing that adding the question would cause immigrants to not respond to the census and throw off the survey’s data, leading to less federal funding for those states.

Census data is used to determine the allocation of federal funds for states.



WHY INCLUDE A CITIZENSHIP QUESTION LIKE THAT ON A CENSUS FORM? AS A SEARCH TERM KEY WORD FOR LIST BUILDING, MAYBE? OR TO FRIGHTEN NON-CITIZENS FROM IDENTIFYING THEMSELVES? SEE WHAT ARI BERMAN SAYS.

“THE CHANGE WOULD DENY IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES SIGNIFICANT REPRESENTATION AND SHIFT POLITICAL POWER TO WHITER AND MORE REPUBLICAN AREAS.” . . . . “IT REMAINS BEYOND DOUBT THAT THE PRINCIPLE OF REPRESENTATIONAL EQUALITY FIGURED PROMINENTLY IN THE DECISION TO COUNT PEOPLE, WHETHER OR NOT THEY QUALIFY AS VOTERS,” WROTE JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG IN AN 8-0 OPINION.”

THIS IS ANOTHER OF THE REPUBLICAN TACTICS FOR LIMITING THE VOTING AND REPRESENTATION OF BLACK AND BROWN PEOPLE. THEY WANT THEIR TAKEOVER TO BE ACHIEVED BY A VOTE WHICH THE PUBLIC WILL PLACIDLY ASSUME IS TOTALLY LEGAL AND FAIR; BUT IN WHICH A HIGHER PERCENTAGE OF WHITES ARE COUNTED THAN THOSE OTHER PEOPLES. IT IS INTERESTING THAT THIS CITIZENSHIP QUESTION WAS ON THE CENSUS QUESTIONNAIRE UP TO 1950. EACH INTERVENING YEAR THE QUESTION WAS CONSIDERED AS BEING UNIMPORTANT,THEREFORE NOT INCLUDED, UNTIL NOW.


http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/30/what-to-know-about-the-citizenship-question-the-census-bureau-is-planning-to-ask-in-2020/
MARCH 30, 2018
What to know about the citizenship question the Census Bureau is planning to ask in 2020
BY D’VERA COHN

For the first time since 1950, the U.S. Census Bureau is planning to ask everyone living in the United States whether they are citizens when it conducts its next decennial census in 2020. Anticipating that some immigrants might avoid answering the question, the Trump administration wants to try using other government records to fill in missing responses.

The new question would be included at the Justice Department’s request, according to a memo by Wilbur Ross, secretary of the Commerce Department (which oversees the Census Bureau). It would supply block-level data on the citizen and noncitizen voting age population.

The Justice Department sought to include the question because it uses data about eligible voters – the citizen voting-age population – to help enforce protections for minority voters (including those who speak languages other than English) under the federal Voting Rights Act. The Justice Department now relies on data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, a sample survey that covers 2.6% of the population each year. The department wants more “scope, detail and certainty” that only the full census can provide to enforce the Voting Rights Act, Ross said.

Ross said the census form would use the same wording as what is already used in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which asks respondents to check one of five categories to describe their citizenship status. Three categories apply to people who are U.S. citizens at birth: born in the U.S., born in a U.S. territory, or born abroad with at least one U.S. citizen parent. People who say they are a naturalized U.S. citizen are asked for their naturalization year. The fifth category is “not a U.S. citizen.” The survey does not ask whether noncitizens are legally in the country.


Lawsuit challenges new question

The citizenship question is included in the list of census questions that the Census Bureau sent to Congress this week. But the new question’s inclusion has been challenged in court on the grounds that it could cause many immigrants to skip the 2020 census out of fear their information could be used against them, even though it is illegal to share a person’s census responses with law enforcement or immigration agencies.

A lawsuit by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra contends that if the census undercounted immigrants, it would be an incomplete population count that violates its constitutional purpose, which is to divide up seats in the U.S. House of Representatives based on the total U.S. population. (Census numbers also are used to allocate billions of dollars in federal funds.) The California lawsuit also says the Trump administration failed to follow government procedures for adding questions to the decennial census form.

If immigrants shun the census, it could reduce the number of congressional seats and the amount of federal funding in states with large numbers of foreign-born residents, such as California, which has more than any other state. Many of these states are dominated by Democratic leaders and elected officials, who have taken the lead in pressing the issue. But an undercount also could affect Republican-dominated states such as Florida and Texas. More broadly, social scientists say that if immigrants avoid the national headcount, the census results will be flawed, hurting health and social science research.

The California lawsuit quoted a 2017 Census Bureau memo that reported a recent rise in immigrants’ fears about the confidentiality of their personal information in surveys and focus groups, with some citing Trump administration actions intended to reduce unauthorized immigration. But the Ross memo says there is no “definitive, empirical support” for the claim that putting a citizenship question on the 2020 census would reduce response rates. The memo quoted data on the share of people who did not answer the question on the American Community Survey, including 11.6% to 12.3% of Hispanic respondents in 2013-2016, but it said there were “similar nonresponse rate ranges” for other questions on that survey.

However, the Ross memo acknowledged that many noncitizens do give incorrect answers to the citizenship question. Quoting a Census Bureau analysis, it said that among noncitizens whose responses to census questions about their citizenship status could be matched with other government records about them, about 30% erroneously said they were citizens.

Filling in missing answers

Ross said the citizenship question will be the last one on the form, in order to “minimize any impact on decennial census response rates.”

He also ordered the bureau to make it a priority to acquire other federal and state government records that it could use to fill in missing responses to the citizenship question. The bureau already fills in missing data about people in the census using a statistical technique called “imputation,” relying on information about neighboring households. In the 2010 census, imputation added more than a million people to the household population, and it filled in missing data about age, sex and race for even more people.

The bureau is already studying how to use government records, such as Social Security or Internal Revenue Service files, to fill in missing data from people who do not turn in their 2020 census forms or answer specific questions on the form. There are some obstacles, though: Government records themselves can include errors and do not cover the entire population.

The Ross memo states that he would like the Census Bureau to compare individual census responses with individual government records to determine “the inaccurate response rate for citizens and non-citizens alike using the entire population.” That would enable the bureau to establish “the accurate ratio of citizen to non-citizen responses to impute for that small percentage of cases where it is necessary to do so.”

The Census Bureau’s acting director, Ron Jarmin, told an advisory committee this week that the agency would conduct a survey of 50,000 households, as well as 42 focus groups, examining attitudes about the privacy and confidentiality of census data.

Citizenship asked in the past

A citizenship question was asked in each decennial census of the total population from 1890 to 1950. (The 1820, 1830 and 1870 census questionnaires also included some form of a question about citizenship.) Until 1920, it was only asked of adult men; women and children automatically had the same citizenship status as their husbands or fathers. The question was not asked in the 1960 census. Since then, the citizenship question has been asked of only a sample of households, either on the census long form or the American Community Survey, which replaced it in 2010.

The government’s interest in asking about citizenship coincided with a rise in immigration to the U.S., ultimately peaking at nearly 15% of the population in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Immigration slowed sharply after restrictions were enacted in the 1920s, to less than 5% of the population in 1970. The removal of the citizenship question from census questions asked of all households came as the Census Bureau reduced the number of questions asked of all households and began asking more questions – including citizenship – of a sample of the population. Beginning in 1970, most people filled out their own census forms, rather than having census-takers fill out the information about them.

Photo of D’Vera Cohn
D’Vera Cohn is a senior writer/editor focusing on immigration and demographics at Pew Research Center.



VRA* -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965

Voting Rights Act of 1965
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting.[7][8] It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the Civil Rights Movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections.[7] Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act secured the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of federal civil rights legislation ever enacted in the country.[9]

The Act contains numerous provisions that regulate elections. The Act's "general provisions" provide nationwide protections for voting rights. Section 2 is a general provision that prohibits every state and local government from imposing any voting law that results in discrimination against racial or language minorities. Other general provisions specifically outlaw literacy tests and similar devices that were historically used to disenfranchise racial minorities. . . . .

Following the 1964 elections, civil rights organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) pushed for federal action to protect the voting rights of racial minorities.[21]:254–255 Their efforts culminated in protests in Alabama, particularly in the city of Selma, where County Sheriff Jim Clark's police force violently resisted African-American voter registration efforts. Speaking about the voting rights push in Selma, James Forman of SNCC said:

Our strategy, as usual, was to force the U.S. government to intervene in case there were arrests—and if they did not intervene, that inaction would once again prove the government was not on our side and thus intensify the development of a mass consciousness among blacks. Our slogan for this drive was "One Man, One Vote."[21]:255

In January 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Bevel,[22][23] and other civil rights leaders organized several demonstrations in Selma that led to violent clashes with police. These marches received national media coverage and drew attention to the issue of voting rights. King and other demonstrators were arrested during a march on February 1 for violating an anti-parade ordinance; this inspired similar marches in the following days, causing hundreds more to be arrested.[21]:259–261 On February 4, civil rights leader Malcolm X gave a militant speech in Selma in which he said that many African Americans did not support King's nonviolent approach;[21]:262 he later privately said that he wanted to frighten whites into supporting King.[14]:69 The next day, King was released and a letter he wrote addressing voting rights, "Letter From A Selma Jail", appeared in The New York Times.[21]:262

With the nation paying increasing attention to Selma and voting rights, President Johnson reversed his decision to delay voting rights legislation, and on February 6, he announced he would send a proposal to Congress.[14]:69 However, he did not reveal the proposal's content or when it would come before Congress.[21]:264

On February 18 in Marion, Alabama, state troopers violently broke up a nighttime voting-rights march during which officer James Bonard Fowler shot and killed young African-American protester Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was unarmed and protecting his mother.[21]:265[24] Spurred by this event, and at the initiation of Bevel,[21]:267[22][23][25]:81–86 on March 7 SCLC and SNCC began the Selma to Montgomery marches in which Selma residents proceeded to march to Alabama's capital, Montgomery, to highlight voting rights issues and present Governor George Wallace with their grievances. On the first march, demonstrators were stopped by state and county police on horseback at the Edmund Pettus Bridge near Selma. The police shot tear gas into the crowd and trampled protesters. Televised footage of the scene, which became known as "Bloody Sunday", generated outrage across the country.[17]:515

In the wake of the events in Selma, President Johnson, addressing a televised joint session of Congress on March 15, called on legislators to enact expansive voting rights legislation. He concluded his speech with the words "we shall overcome", a major theme of the Civil Rights Movement.[21]:278[26] The legislation that Johnson referred to was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was introduced in Congress two days later while civil rights leaders, now under the protection of federal troops, led a march of 25,000 people from Selma to Montgomery.[17]:516[21]:279, 282

Original bill

Senate

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was introduced in Congress on March 17, 1965 as S. 1564, and it was jointly sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL), both of whom had worked with Attorney General Katzenbach to draft the bill's language.[27] Although Democrats held two-thirds of the seats in both chambers of Congress after the 1964 Senate elections,[14]:49 Johnson worried that Southern Democrats would filibuster the legislation, as they had opposed other civil rights efforts. He enlisted Dirksen to help gain Republican support. Dirksen did not originally intend to support voting rights legislation so soon after supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but he expressed willingness to accept "revolutionary" legislation after learning about the police violence against marchers in Selma on Bloody Sunday.[14]:95–96 Given Dirksen's key role in helping Katzenbach draft the legislation, it became known informally as the "Dirksenbach" bill.[14]:96 After Mansfield and Dirksen introduced the bill, 64 additional Senators agreed to cosponsor it,[14]:150 with a total 46 Democratic and 20 Republican cosponsors.[28]

The bill contained several special provisions that targeted certain state and local governments: a "coverage formula" that determined which jurisdictions were subject to the Act's other special provisions ("covered jurisdictions"); a "preclearance" requirement that prohibited covered jurisdictions from implementing changes to their voting procedures without first receiving approval from the U.S. Attorney General or the U.S. District Court for D.C. that the changes were not discriminatory; and the suspension of "tests or devices", such as literacy tests, in covered jurisdictions. The bill also authorized the assignment of federal examiners to register voters, and of federal observers to monitor elections, to covered jurisdictions that were found to have engaged in egregious discrimination. The bill set these special provisions to expire after five years.[16]:319–320[17]:520, 524[29]:5–6

The scope of the coverage formula was a matter of contentious Congressional debate. The coverage formula reached a jurisdiction if: (1) the jurisdiction maintained a "test or device" on November 1, 1964, and (2) less than 50% of the jurisdiction's voting-age residents either were registered to vote on November 1, 1964 or cast a ballot in the November 1964 presidential election.[16]:317 This formula reached few jurisdictions outside the Deep South. To appease legislators who felt that the bill unfairly targeted Southern jurisdictions, the bill included a general prohibition on racial discrimination in voting that applied nationwide.[ The bill also included provisions allowing a covered jurisdiction to "bail out" of coverage by proving in federal court that it had not used a "test or device" for a discriminatory purpose or with a discriminatory effect during the 5 years preceding its bailout request.[29]:6 Additionally, the bill included a "bail in" provision under which federal courts could subject discriminatory non-covered jurisdictions to remedies contained in the special provisions.[31][32]:2006–2007
. . . . However, support for H.R. 7896 dissipated after William M. Tuck (D-VA) publicly said he preferred H.R. 7896 because the Voting Rights Act would legitimately ensure that African Americans could vote. His statement alienated most supporters of H.R. 7896, and the bill failed on the House floor by a 171-248 vote on July 9.[35] Later that night, the House passed the Voting Rights Act by a 333-85 vote (Democrats 221-61, Republicans 112-24).[14]:163–165[28][36]

Conference committee

The chambers appointed a conference committee to resolve differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill. A major contention concerned the poll tax provisions; the Senate version allowed the Attorney General to sue states that used poll taxes to discriminate, while the House version outright banned all poll taxes. Initially, the committee members were stalemated. To help broker a compromise, Attorney General Katzenbach drafted legislative language explicitly asserting that poll taxes were unconstitutional and instructed the Department of Justice to sue the states that maintained poll taxes. To assuage concerns of liberal committee members that this provision was not strong enough, Katzenbach enlisted the help of Martin Luther King, Jr., who gave his support to the compromise. King's endorsement ended the stalemate, and on July 29, the conference committee reported its version out of committee.[14]:166–167 The House approved this conference report version of the bill on August 3 by a 328-74 vote (Democrats 217-54, Republicans 111-20),[37] and the Senate passed it on August 4 by a 79-18 vote (Democrats 49-17, Republicans 30-1).[14]:167[38][39] On August 6, President Johnson signed the Act into law with King, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and other civil rights leaders in attendance at the signing ceremony.[14]:168

. . . . Congress enacted major amendments to the Act in 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006. Each amendment coincided with an impending expiration of some or all of the Act's special provisions. Originally set to expire by 1970, Congress repeatedly reauthorized the special provisions in recognition of continuing voting discrimination.[14]:209–210[29]:6–8 Congress extended the coverage formula and special provisions tied to it, such as the Section 5 preclearance requirement, for five years in 1970, seven years in 1975, and 25 years in both 1982 and 2006.

In 1970 and 1975, Congress also expanded the reach of the coverage formula by supplementing it with new 1968 and 1972 trigger dates. Coverage was further enlarged in 1975 when Congress expanded the meaning of "tests or devices" to encompass any jurisdiction that provided English-only election information, such as ballots, if the jurisdiction had a single language minority group that constituted more than five percent of the jurisdiction's voting-age citizens. These expansions brought numerous jurisdictions into coverage, including many outside of the South.[40] To ease the burdens of the reauthorized special provisions, Congress liberalized the bailout procedure in 1982 by allowing jurisdictions to escape coverage by complying with the Act and affirmatively acting to expand minority political participation.[17]:523 . . . . In addition to reauthorizing the original special provisions and expanding coverage, Congress amended and added several other provisions to the Act. For instance, Congress expanded the original ban on "tests or devices" to apply nationwide in 1970, and in 1975, Congress made the ban permanent.[29]:6–9 Separately, in 1975 Congress expanded the Act's scope to protect language minorities from voting discrimination.

. . . . In 2014, the Voting Rights Amendments Act was introduced in Congress to create a new coverage formula and amend various other provisions in response to the Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which struck down the coverage formula as unconstitutional.[47] It was referred to the Constitution and Civil Justice congressional subcommittee on February 11, 2015, but no action was taken on it, and it expired.[48]


SO HERE WE ARE IN 2018, BATTLING A NEW AND YOUNGER CITIZENRY WHO ARE OVERTLY WHITE SUPREMACISTS IN A CERTAIN NUMBER OF CASES, AND OTHERS WHO MAY NOT WANT THE GOVERNMENT OF THE USA TO PROHIBIT, OPENLY, FREE AND LEGAL VOTING, BUT THEY DON’T CARE ENOUGH ABOUT THE PRINCIPLE OF EQUALITY UNDER THE LAW TO EVEN VOTE AGAINST DONALD TRUMP. THE FACT THAT HE USED THE WHITE POWER CODE WORDS IN HIS SPEECHES AND RALLIES DOESN’T DISTURB THEM ENOUGH TO PRODUCE A GOOD OUTCRY AGAINST HIM AND HIS FOLLOWERS, EXCEPT AMONG US “LIBERALS AND PROGRESSIVES.”

IS IT DUE TO FEAR OF BEING STIGMATIZED BY NEIGHBORS AND FRIENDS, OR A SORT OF SOCIAL BOREDOM THAT CAUSES THIS MALAISE? OR IS IT SIMPLY THE FACT THAT WE ALL KNOW THAT WE WHITES WILL BE PROTECTED IF THERE IS A HARDCORE “CRACKDOWN” FROM THE TOP RANGES OF GOVERNMENT? AND THERE AGAIN IS THAT DISTASTEFUL PHRASE “WHITE PRIVILEGE,” ONLY NOW IT MAY MATTER A GREAT DEAL. IN THIS CASE, I’M USING THE CATEGORY TO INCLUDE IMMIGRANTS OF ALL KINDS AS WELL AS THE DARKER SKIN COLORS.

IN CASE YOU THINK I’M BEING RIDICULOUS, THINK ABOUT THE 12,000 PLUS CHILDREN WHO ARE NOT AVAILABLE FOR A CERTAIN RESPECTED DEMOCRATIC SENATOR TO VISIT IN THEIR WAREHOUSE STYLE HOUSING, SEPARATED FROM THEIR PARENTS JUST A FEW WEEKS AGO AS THE FAMILY CROSSED OVER FROM MEXICO AT A NON-APPROVED LOCATION.

THIS NEXT ARTICLE BY MOTHER JONES GIVES LOTS MORE HARDCORE INFORMATION.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/06/we-now-know-why-steve-bannon-and-kris-kobach-lobbied-for-a-citizenship-question-on-the-census/
We Now Know Why Steve Bannon and Kris Kobach Lobbied for a Citizenship Question on the Census
New documents reveal anti-immigration hardliners’ motivation in pushing for the question.
Ari Berman Jun. 11, 2018 4:08 PM

PHOTOGRAPH -- Then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon with President Donald Trump last year.Evan Vucci/AP

In December 2017, the Justice Department asked the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, to add a controversial question about US citizenship to the 2020 census for the first time since 1950. Civil rights groups charged that the question would depress the response rate from immigrants and threaten the accuracy and fairness of the census. The Justice Department justified the question by arguing it was needed to “fully enforce” the Voting Rights Act (VRA). But new documents show there was another reason anti-immigration hardliners like Steve Bannon were pushing for the citizenship question.

On Friday, the Justice Department released more than 1,300 pages of documents as part of a lawsuit filed by New York and 16 other states agains the Trump administration. These files showed that prominent anti-immigration forces inside and outside the Trump administration were hoping that census data resulting from the citizenship question would be used to allocate political representation on the basis of the number of citizens in a district or state rather than the total population. In other words, a state’s number of representatives in Congress would be determined by its population of citizens—a radical departure from the current practice of counting every person regardless of citizenship. The change would deny immigrant communities significant representation and shift political power to whiter and more Republican areas.

The initial push for the citizenship question now appears to have come from Bannon, back when he was a top White House adviser. In July 2017, months before the Justice Department proposed the question, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach—at the time the vice chair of President Donald Trump’s now-defunct Election Integrity Commission—wrote to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. He told Ross that he was writing “at the direction of Steve Bannon” and said it was “essential” that the citizenship question be added to the census. Kobach wrote that the absence of a citizenship question “leads to the problem that aliens who do not actually ‘reside’ in the United States are still counted for congressional apportionment purposes.”

Kobach’s correspondence with Ross contradicts the Trump administration’s stated rationale for the question—Kobach never mentioned the VRA in his letter—and lends credence to the view that the question was added to target areas with many immigrants and boost Republicans politically.

Kobach has a long history of voter suppression and was recently held in contempt of court for refusing to register voters in Kansas.

The Constitution requires the census to count “the whole number of persons in each State” regardless of citizenship or legal status. In the 2016 case Evenwel v. Abbott, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that states should draw legislative maps based on total population, not the number of citizens in a district. “It remains beyond doubt that the principle of representational equality figured prominently in the decision to count people, whether or not they qualify as voters,” wrote Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in an 8-0 opinion.

Nonetheless, anti-immigrant Republicans are now endorsing Kobach’s position. At a hearing on Capitol Hill on Friday, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee’s subpanel on the Constitution, said “illegal aliens” should be excluded from political representation.

The documents, first reported by NPR, also show that Ross overruled career census staff in making his decision in March to approve the citizenship question. (He wrote at the time that it would lead to “more effective enforcement” of the VRA.) John Abowd, the chief scientist at the Census Bureau, wrote to Ross that the citizenship question “is very costly, harms the quality of the census count, and would use substantially less accurate citizenship status data than are available from administrative sources.”

Six major lawsuits, including the one from New York and 16 other states, are currently challenging the citizenship question.


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