On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “MTP Daily,” DNC Chair Tom Perez criticized the Trump administration’s move to add a citizenship question to the Census as “an intimidation tactic” and “voter suppression.”

Perez began by saying that the Census is supposed to count the number of people in the US, not the number of citizens. He later cited the Constitution‘s enumeration requirement that representatives and taxes are apportioned by the number of people in each state.

He added, “It is wrong to do this, and you know what? When I hear the voting rights justification used to say this is why we need to do this, as someone who enforced the Voting Rights Act at the Justice Department for a number of years, the Voting Rights Act does not require this. And frankly, it’s insulting to the people who gave their lives in the passage of the Voting Rights Act to use the Voting Rights Act as a perverse justification for voter suppression.”

Perez further argued that the Trump administration is “trying to scare people. This is an intimidation tactic. There are many mixed-status families…and they’re trying to make sure their count isn’t accurate.”

Perez concluded, “This is a first cousin of these voter ID laws sought to make sure that African-Americans and Latinos can’t vote. This is not who we are as a nation.”

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