March 27, 2018 (New York, NY) – Hispanic Federation has released the following statement regarding the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
"As part of its continuing assault of immigrants in America, the Trump administration has now decided to weaponize the U.S. Census by asking respondents a question about their citizenship status. For more than five decades, the U.S. Census Bureau has avoided this question because of the ramifications it will certainly have on the accuracy of the nation's population count. Indeed, a host of experts, advocates, and civic leaders have warned this administration that adding a last-minute, untested question on citizenship could, essentially, deprive the government, and all who depend on census data, of an accurate portrait of the U.S. population. Despite these warnings, the administration has effectively created a situation where immigrants, both documented and undocumented, will be less likely to participate in the census thus undermining its reliability.
The Justice Department, which has prodded the Commerce Department to change the census, has explained that a citizenship question is a necessary element in its efforts to protect voting rights. Even for an administration as cravenly duplicitous as the Trump Administration, this is a spectacularly shameless claim. If anything has characterized President Trump and Attorney General Sessions' views of voting rights it is their hostility to making voting easier, more accessible, and more reliable.
Hispanic Federation will work with its allies in the civil rights, business, immigrant, and academic communities to oppose the addition of the citizenship question in the 2020 Census and protect the integrity of one of our nation's most important research and governance tools."
