The U.S. Census Bureau has asked several states to turn over driver’s license records that include personal data like eye color as part of President Donald Trump’s effort to obtain citizenship data.

The Census Bureau said Tuesday that it requested the information as part of its effort to use existing government records to compile data on citizenship. The agency said it was requesting the records to comply with Trump’s July executive order asking it to do just that after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the president’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

The proposed citizenship question effort set off a firestorm of criticism from civil rights groups and activists who said it would discourage marginalized people, including noncitizens and people of color, from responding to the decennial survey. After the court ruling, the Trump administration has said it would gather citizenship data through other methods, potentially enabling lawmakers to redraw districts to benefit Republicans by leaving noncitizens out of the census count.

HuffPost obtained a draft memorandum the Census Bureau submitted to multiple states that would govern the sharing of driver’s license records. The document outlines a request for monthly driver’s license records between 2018 and 2023. It asks for 11 fields of information that would potentially be on a driver’s license ― including citizenship status and eye color. (The Census Bureau’s request for driver’s license records was first reported by The Associated Press.)

It’s not unusual for the Census Bureau to seek data from states. But two former directors of the Census Bureau said that asking for this specific data is both surprising and unnecessary.

Asking about eye color, in particular, “is very strange,” said Kenneth Prewitt, who served as director of the Census Bureau from 1998 to 2001.

“I cannot imagine how it would be useful in constructing population statistics, which is the task of the Census Bureau — not detailed data about individuals,” Prewitt said.

“We start our discussions by requesting the full list of characteristics as we are aware of them for our data inventory,” said Michael Cook, a Census Bureau spokesperson, in an email. “Then, if the full dataset is not available we will then enter into discussions about what we need for the specific project.”

“For driver’s license records, eye color, is one of the database characteristics so it’s part of initial request,” he wrote.

In general, driver’s licenses aren’t particularly good indicators of citizenship because motorists are only required to update them once every few years, during which their citizenship status may change, Prewitt said. Driver’s license info is only useful for finding addresses and ages, he said.

“Beyond that, they’re no data there,” he added. “That’s not data that’s particularly hard for the Census Bureau to get.”