Undercounting immigrants living in detention centers

The census determines the apportionment of representatives in Congress and the distribution of public benefits. For years, legal advocacy groups such as the NAACP LDF have sought to prevent felon disenfranchisement and to ensure that prisoners are counted in their usual residence, not the location of their sites of incarceration. They argue that the census is meant to count people in their usual place of residence, and that counting prisoners in their jail sites overemphasizes the political power of the communities where the jails are located. These communities are often rural and predominantly white; they tend not share their demographic attributes or political interests of the prisoner’s usual place of residence. Advocates also argue that removing them from the population count for their originating counties dilutes the power of those communities.

A similar argument is being made that immigrants who are held in detention centers, often hundreds or thousands of miles from where they settled in the US before being detained, should be counted in their home communities rather than the detention centers to avoid dilution of their political power and public benefits. Some even say that immigrats are being held for census count and then deported. Although the census requires all persons be counted, without regard to their citizenship status, there have been ongoing efforts to condition counting on citizenship by limiting total population to the subset of the voting-age population.

MHC