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Previously unreleased internal communications show the Trump administration tried to add a citizenship question to the census in order to sway congressional redistricting, according to a report released Wednesday by the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
The documents appeared to contradict statements made under oath by then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who told the committee that insisting on a citizenship question was unrelated to apportionment and the reason it was added was to help enforce the Voting Rights Act .
The nearly 500 documents include several drafts of an August 2017 memorandum prepared by Commerce Department attorney and political appointee James Uttmeyer, in which he initially warned that using a citizenship question for distribution would likely be illegal and violate the constitution , the report said.
In later drafts, Uttmeier and another political appointee, Earl Comstock, revised the draft to say there was “nothing illegal or unconstitutional in adding a question of citizenship” and asserting that the Founding Fathers “intended the enumeration of the apportionment to be based on of legal residents,” the report said. In December 2017, the Justice Department sent a formal request to the Commerce Department, which runs the Census Bureau, asking it to add the question; in March 2018, Ross announced that he would be added to the 2020 census.
“Today’s committee memorandum pulls back the curtain on this shameful behavior and makes clear how the Trump administration has covertly attempted to manipulate the census for political gain while lying to the public and Congress about its goals,” Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney ( DN. Y.), said in a statement.
The administration’s efforts to add the question lasted two years. It was challenged by civil rights groups, who criticized it as an attempt to understate Hispanic numbers and scare immigrant communities from participating in a survey that determines congressional reapportionment and redistricting, as well as the disbursement of $1.5 trillion in federal funds annually.
The new evidence echoes documents that surfaced during litigation over the issue, including a study by a Republican operative that found adding a citizenship question would benefit Republicans in redistricting.
“It was obvious that this was just a farce,” said former Census Bureau Director John Thompson, who testified at the time, saying the bureau under Ross had failed to properly test the citizenship question before added it. “I’m glad the committee got the material to reinforce that, but it wasn’t surprising.”
Thomas Wolff, deputy director of the Program on Democracy at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, said: “Lest there be any doubt that what the Trump administration is up to is wrong, these documents show that even the administration itself Trump knew what she was doing was illegal.”
The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the administration’s stated rationale for adding the question was “fabricated,” and the administration abandoned the effort. It then said it would instead block undocumented immigrants from being counted for distribution, setting off a new volley of legal battles that have dragged on into the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency.
That effort ultimately failed when, due to pandemic-related delays, the Census Bureau was unable to deliver the state’s population totals to the president before he left office. The administration also failed to explain how it plans to identify and count undocumented immigrants for whom there is no official count.
Census data show increasing diversity; the number of white people is declining for the first time
Documents obtained by the commission were withheld by the Trump administration despite subpoenas, the report said, adding that the commission faced “unprecedented obstruction” from administration officials. Ross and then-Attorney General William P. Barr were held in contempt of Congress after refusing to produce them, the report noted, adding that the previously withheld or redacted documents were finally released “after more than two years of litigation disputes and the arrival of a new administration.”
Maloney introduced a bill last week that she says aims to protect the Census Bureau from future attempts to politicize it. HR 8326, the Fair and Accurate Census Act, would prevent the removal of a Census Bureau director without just cause, limits the number of political appointees to the bureau and prohibits the Commerce Secretary from adding topics or questions to the study “unless he or she has followed existing statutory requirements for prior notification of Congress.” It would also prohibit new questions from appearing on the decennial census form unless they have been “researched, tested, certified by the Secretary, and evaluated by the Government Accountability Office.”
Thompson praised the bill. “I think it would protect the independence of the Census Bureau,” he said. “I am very enthusiastic about the bill. … I hope it will be accepted.”
But even if it is, it may not completely insulate the bureau from partisan interference, he said. Under the Republican House and Senate, “Congress can direct the Census Bureau to collect citizenship [information] on the census, and then there could be a battle to include the question of citizenship in the 2030 census,” he said, adding, “Congress could try to pass a law that says you have to do an apportionment by citizenship. “
The bar for passing a constitutional amendment will be high, Wolff said. However, the Trump administration’s effort to add the citizenship question and exclude undocumented people from the allocation “shows that the 2020 census was in grave danger, and we have escaped only through a combination of significant legal victories and a certain amount of luck “, he said. “The census is clearly too fragile to continue in its endangered state.”
Along with limiting political appointments and giving more powers to the Census Bureau director, as proposed in Maloney’s bill, Wolf proposed limiting the president’s ability to influence allocations, as Trump has proposed to do. By law, redistricting of the 435 House seats must be done automatically based on the state’s total population.
“The president’s role in the appropriations process was supposed to be administrative,” Wolff said. “That’s why it’s called automatic distribution.”
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