In order to "protect minority population voting rights," the Trump administration intends to ask everyone living in the United States if they are citizens of the United States in the upcoming 2020 census. Explaining his decision last year, Wilbur Ross, whose Department of Commerce oversees the Census Bureau, asserted that collecting data related to voting eligibility will allow the Justice Department to better identify local election-related practices which violate the Voting Rights Act by discriminating on the basis of race, color, or limited English proficiency.

Ross's rationale is a strange one, for several reasons. As a general matter, the conservative movement loathes the Voting Rights Act, and counts among its most significant recent courthouse victories a landmark 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted some of the law's key provisions. Adding this question is redundant, since the Bureau already collects citizenship data in a smaller survey it conducts on a monthly basis. (Federal law prohibits it from sharing responses with law enforcement or any other federal agency.) And Ross's determination ignores the chorus of experts—many of whom the Bureau retains specifically to weigh in on complicated matters like this one—who warn that including the query will deter non-citizens, terrified that the government will use their answers to deport them, from participating in the census altogether. Previous versions of the census asked about respondents' citizenship; since 1950, for this reason, it has not.

Census-taking logistics are boring, but have a tremendous impact on each ten-year chunk of American life that follows. The purpose of conducting such an enormous undertaking is to count everyone, regardless of immigration status, who lives in this country—their names, their ages, their ethnic backgrounds, their occupations, and so on. This is not fodder for an ICE sweep; it is a bureaucratic data-gathering enterprise. Legislators rely on accurate results to, among many other things, make congressional apportionment decisions and distribute hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funds. Experts are leery about adding a citizenship question, then, because a systemic undercount of undocumented immigrants—which some estimate would be as high as five percent—could deprive their neighborhoods of equitable representation in Washington, and of critical financial resources for things like affordable housing, food assistance, and health services.

MANDEL NGAN

Most troublingly for Ross's credibility, however, is the fact that his voting rights rationale is not the one on which he relied behind closed doors. Although Ross has claimed the request for a citizenship question originated from the Justice Department, federal court rulings which have—for now—prevented the Bureau from finalizing Ross's decision detail how the secretary, shortly after his confirmation in 2017, pushed the issue seemingly on his own.

As it so happens, this occurred around same time he talked it over with then-attorney general Jeff Sessions, whose willingness to wage a perpetual war on immigrants is all that kept him on the job for as long as he held it, and former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, the Republican Party's chief perpetrator of "voter fraud" conspiracy theories designed to suppress minority election turnout. Ross and Kobach, as U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman wrote in January, even "discussed the potential effect on 'congressional apportionment' of adding 'one simple question' to the census." Imagine that.