Raul A. Reyes is an attorney and member of the USA Today board of contributors. Follow him on Twitter @RaulAReyes. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. View more opinions on CNN.

(CNN) In a plot twist worthy of a crime novel, the New York Times reported on Thursday that the hard drives of a dead political strategist reveal that the Trump administration's decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census was part of an alleged plot to help elect white Republicans.

Raul Reyes

The strategist, Thomas Hofeller, was a Republican known as "the Michelangelo of gerrymandering" for his work in creating partisan districts that benefited the GOP. Files on hard drives discovered by his daughter after his death showed that he wrote a 2015 study that found that adding a citizenship question to the census would lead to more Republican-friendly congressional maps..

Files on the drives also showed that he wrote the key portion of a draft letter that the Department of Justice used to maintain, dubiously, that the citizenship question was needed to help enforce the Voting Rights Act. The Times noted that "the disclosures represent the most explicit evidence to date that the Trump administration added the question to the 2020 census to advance Republican Party interests."

These revelations will not surprise anyone who has followed ongoing legal wrangling over citizenship and the census. On this issue -- which will affect the day-to-day lives of millions of Americans for years-- the Trump administration has consistently acted in bad faith and with disregard for the integrity of the census.

Every 10 years since 1790, the census has counted all the people in the country. The 14th Amendment explicitly states that "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed." The word "citizen" does not appear in this provision. The framers' intent was clear. Apportionment was to be based on a count of all persons -- whether they were citizens or not.