Trump’s action Tuesday once again pits the president against civil rights groups and state and city officials, who warned that the question would decrease participation among immigrant communities, diminishing their political power and jeopardizing federal funding in mostly Democratic-leaning areas. The 2020 census will also be used to redraw the House districts that determine congressional representation, as well as to help distribute $1.5 trillion in federal funding.
The memo will face a swift legal challenge. Trump has already been forced to drop an effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census last year after the Supreme Court blocked him, saying the administration’s stated rationale for adding the question — to better protect minority voting rights — “seems to have been contrived” and was less an “explanation” than a “distraction.”
“We’ll see him in court, and win, again,” said Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, which challenged the citizenship question.
Yet for Trump, the move builds on a series of actions he has taken against immigrants, even those who are in the country legally, as he ramps up his reelection campaign. Trump recently signed an executive order barring most categories of foreign workers through the end of the year because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The move is the latest signal that Trump will make immigration a central theme of his campaign, just like in 2016, when Trump promised to build a wall on the southern border and deport millions of migrants who arrived in the country illegally.
On Capitol Hill, Democrats expressed outrage. The House Oversight and Reform Committee immediately scheduled an emergency meeting for next week to discuss the president’s memo.
“Taking this step right in the middle of the ongoing census is particularly egregious and sinister because it appears purposefully designed to depress the count, deter people from filling out their forms and corrupt the democratic processes on which our nation is founded,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (N.Y.), the committee’s chairwoman.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it “yet another racially driven attack by a president and administration that wrongly views immigrants as the enemy, when they are a vital part of our society.”
