At least 12 states have announced they will sue the administration, and others are likely to follow.

“In the current environment, where there is overt hostility toward immigrants coming from the White House, this does not generate trust in the census,” said Arturo Vargas, the executive director of the Naleo Educational Fund. According to Tomás Jiménez, a sociologist at Stanford specializing in immigration and assimilation, “the intent is incredibly nefarious.”

How to conclude otherwise? Reforms to the census focused on millions of Hispanics and Middle Easterners, based on years of research, have been tossed aside. It is not a coincidence that these are two groups President Trump has targeted repeatedly. His administration’s decisions will cost those men and women, in both political and concrete ways.

It is also no coincidence that the reforms the administration is resisting would have decreased the number of American “Whites.” Census research showed that when presented with the proposed changes, Hispanics identified as “Hispanic” alone at significantly higher rates than they did as “White (Hispanic)” or “Some Other Race (Hispanic).” The same was true for residents of Middle Eastern origin, who, when given a category of their own, mostly chose it over “White.”

This would have exposed the fact that the category of “Whites” has been artificially inflated, eroding its primacy at a time when whiteness — of the decidedly European strain — has gained new currency. To be white in President Trump’s America is to fundamentally belong. Unlike brownness, which remains at the margins, whiteness is at the center of the American origin story — a powerful narrative about how this country came to be and what made it great (and indeed what might make it great again).

Perhaps this is the reason the administration opted to ignore the advice of its own bureau, to keep America’s demographic destiny at bay and, in so doing, to silence the narrative about who we really are.

Or maybe it was this: In our present moment of marginalization and deportation, scorn and dismissal, to self-identify as Hispanic or Arab-American is a political act. To be counted is to secure a place in the story of this country. It is to will the American narrative to bend in the direction of change.

No wonder this government has taken the tool with which to do so off the table. There is strength in numbers, after all. What better way to undermine that strength than to refuse a count in the first place?