Documents detail the secret strategy behind Trump’s census citizenship question push

In 2019, the Supreme Court in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts rejected the Trump administration’s effort to ask a question about U.S. citizenship on the 2020 Census.  NPR reports that the Trump administration’s push to add a citizenship question to the census was part of a secret strategy to alter the population numbers used to divide up seats in Congress and the Electoral College, internal documents show. The hotly contested question — “Is this a person a citizen of the United States?” — ultimately did not end up on the 2020 census forms.

As reported by NPR,

“Multiple drafts of a newly released memo from 2017 show that in the months before the March 2018 announcement of then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’ decision to add a citizenship question, Trump officials were particularly focused on who specifically should be included in the census numbers used to reapportion congressional seats and electoral votes among the states once a decade.

Both U.S. citizens and noncitizens, regardless of their immigration status, have been part of those official numbers since the country’s first national head count in 1790. Despite the 14th Amendment’s requirement to include the “whole number of persons in each state,” however, Trump officials were searching for a way to exclude unauthorized immigrants.”

KJ