Former President Trump’s administration spent years pushing to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census so that noncitizens would not be counted in population counts that determine congressional apportionment, according to a memo released Wednesday by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
The committee obtained new documents from the Department of Commerce and the Department of Justice after a lengthy legal battle with the federal agencies and provided an analysis of the documents in the memo.
While the Trump administration publicly argued the citizenship question was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act, the documents show that officials explicitly tried to come up with ways to include the question so they could use it to influence congressional apportionment, in which seats for Congress are divided up in states based on population data obtained through the decennial census.
Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y). also said Trump engaged in “unprecedented obstruction” by asserting executive privilege to deter the committee from getting to the truth.
“Today’s Committee memo pulls back the curtain on this shameful conduct and shows clearly how the Trump Administration secretly tried to manipulate the census for political gain while lying to the public and Congress about their goals,” she said in a statement.
The decennial census not only decides congressional apportionment but also dictates representation at every level of government, all the way down to town council and school board seats. It’s also used to deliver about $1.5 trillion in annual funding to municipalities and critical services across the country.
In 2016, even before Trump was inaugurated, officials on his campaign and transition team pursued the idea of the citizenship question despite knowledge that it likely violated the Constitution, according to Maloney.
Then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross pushed to find a way throughout 2017 to include the citizenship question and tasked his department with coming up with an enforceable idea.
An early draft memo in 2017, obtained by the committee, shows that Department of Commerce officials raised doubts about the legality of the question for apportionment counts. The final memo, however, claimed the opposite, removing language that cast doubts on the citizenship question for apportionment and arguing the question could be used for that reason.
The memo was drafted by James Uthmeier, who was with the Commerce’s Office of General Counsel, and was used to steer the Department of Justice into supporting the inclusion of the question in the 2020 census, according to Maloney.
The department eventually requested in December 2017 that the citizenship question be included in the 2020 census.
In March 2018, Ross announced that he would include a citizenship question in the 2020 census, despite objections from Democrats, who said it would discourage immigrants from filling out the questionnaire and ultimately provide an inaccurate account.
Several lawsuits were filed against the administration in a legal challenge that reached all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In June 2019, the Supreme Court ruled the administration did not give an adequate reason to include the question.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that “the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the secretary gave for his decision.”
“We are presented, in other words, with an explanation for agency action that is incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency’s priorities and decision-making process,” the justice wrote.
The Committee on Oversight and Reform launched an investigation into the decision in January 2019. The Trump administration stonewalled the congressional committee from getting key documents, forcing the committee and the House at large to hold Ross and then-Attorney General William Barr in contempt.
The committee also filed a lawsuit against Ross and Barr, which they settled in January 2022 to receive the key documents.
In her memo, Maloney said the committee’s investigation “exposed how a group of political appointees sought to use the census to advance an ideological agenda.”
“These documents exposed the vulnerability of our national statistical system to partisan manipulation and highlighted the need for Congress to protect the constitutionally mandated census from abuses of power and political interference,” the congresswoman wrote.