The Department of Homeland Security will share citizenship information with the U.S. Census Bureau in keeping with President Trump’s order to collect data on who is an American citizen.

The president’s order came after his administration’s effort to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census form was shot down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

President Trump’s current order has been challenged in federal court, but the DHS nonetheless announced the agreement in a report, saying it would share records to help the Census Bureau determine the number of citizens, non-citizens, and illegal aliens in the country.

According to the document, the information to be shared includes personally identifiable data. The Census Bureau has promised data will be kept for no longer than two years before being destroyed, per the agreement with DHS. That data will then be used as the basis for a model estimating the likelihood that each person is a citizen, non-citizen, or illegal alien.

The document reads:

A model will be estimated for each person with a PIK, using the most current citizenship status from each available citizenship source for the person, as well as the person’s other demographic, household, and location information as explanatory variables. The model will produce a citizenship probability for each person, which will then be combined with age, race, ethnicity, and location information from the 2020 Census to produce the Citizen Voting Age Population (CVAP) statistics. The objective of the project is to determine the number of citizens and non-citizens in the country.

Federal law prohibits the Census Bureau from releasing personally identifiable data. The bureau’s fact sheet on privacy states that “Your answers can only be used to produce statistics — they cannot be used against you in any way.”

Included in the information DHS will provide to the Census Bureau is a person’s alien identification number, country of origin, and the date of naturalization or naturalization application. DHS is still waiting for a decision on whether it will be allowed to release information on applicants for asylum and refugee status, which is normally prohibited from disclosure.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund is one of the organizations challenging the president’s order in federal court in Maryland. Andrea Senteno, an attorney for the group, argued that the information provided by Homeland Security will likely be inaccurate because a person’s citizenship status can change often over time.

“The information out there over whether someone is a non-citizen or what type of immigrant status they may be is going to have a lot of holes in it,” Senteno said.

The department acknowledged the risk that there may be some cases of an inaccurate immigration status being assigned and that DHS information may be linked to data from other sources used by the Census Bureau.

“Linking records between datasets is not likely to be 100% accurate,” the Homeland Security document states.

The president’s order calls on the Census Bureau to collect citizenship-related information through the administrative records of federal agencies and the 50 states. The move was the White House’s response to the defeat last summer of President Trump’s Census citizenship question at the hands of the Supreme Court.

In that case, Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, sided with the court’s liberal justices in ruling that the administration’s justification for the order “seems to have been contrived.”

The White House had said that the question was added to help with enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. But opponents of the move said the question would scare immigrants, Hispanics, and others from participating.

The lawsuit challenging President Trump’s new order likewise claims that the latest effort is motivated by “a racially discriminatory scheme” to weaken the political power of Latinos.

The Census Bureau has requested records from state drivers’ license bureaus, but the only state to cooperate so far has been Nebraska.

The Trump administration has said that gathering citizenship data would give states the option of designing state legislative districts based on the number of voting-age citizens rather than total population, a possibility detractors fear would make districts more right-leaning.

“Whether that approach is permissible will be resolved when a state actually proposes a districting plan based on the voter-eligible population,” said the president’s order. “But because eligibility to vote depends in part on citizenship, states could more effectively exercise this option with a more accurate and complete count of the citizen population.”

The 2020 Census will be used to determine the number of congressional seats assigned to each state, along with how $1.5 trillion in federal funds will be distributed.

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Luis Miguel is a writer whose journalistic endeavors shed light on the Deep State, the immigration crisis, and the enemies of freedom. Follow his exploits on Facebook, Twitter, Bitchute, and at luisantoniomiguel.com.