The House has voted to bring back a citizenship question to the census

The House on Wednesday voted to add a question on citizenship status to future census counts and to exclude non-citizens from apportionment data, approving along party lines a measure that would revive a controversial effort taken up, and later abandoned, by the Trump administration. 

The Equal Representation Act (H.R. 7109) would ensure states with higher rates of non-citizen residents do not “unfairly benefit” in receiving more representatives and federal electors compared to those with lower rates, House Republicans said ahead of the vote. Non-citizens who cannot vote should not be included in the apportionment count, they added. 

The bill mirrors the dual approach taken by President Trump in the run up to the 2020 decennial census, which was met with a bevy of lawsuits and political opposition. The Census Bureau has long understood its mission—the Constitution requires a decennial count of “the whole number of persons in each state”—as a mandate to count all U.S. residents, regardless of their legal or citizenship status. Detractors accused Trump of purposefully seeking to scare Latino and other populations from participating in the count and many advocacy groups warned even the discussion of adding a citizenship question would prove to have a destructive impact. A Census report last year found the bureau likely failed to count “a significant fraction of noncitizens” in 2020. 

The 2020 census was conducted with unprecedented turbulence due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Trump administration’s repeated interventions, including on issues related to citizenship. The administration changed the deadline for the count and the subsequent delivery of data several times after initially delaying the enumeration, which ultimately ended after Supreme Court intervention. 

The back and forth created confusion and chaos among the hundreds of thousands of Census employees in the field, who reported receiving divergent messaging that may have conflicted with the court’s order. The timing disputes followed lawsuits over whether the Trump administration could add a citizenship question to the census questionnaire and remove non-citizens from apportionment data. Neither effort was ultimately successful as the Supreme Court blocked the citizenship question and President Biden quickly reversed Trump’s apportionment decision upon taking office. 

Tim Olson, Census’ associate director for field operations, said before the count started in 2019 the Trump administration’s push on the citizenship question caused disruptions in preparation efforts. While President Trump eventually dropped his attempt to include the question, Olson said his high-profile fight made an impact on immigrant and other communities. 

The effort led to damage control by Census officials, who sought to assure all U.S. residents it was safe to participate in the count and no information would be shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI or the Internal Revenue Service or any law enforcement. 

“We cannot share it with anybody outside of the bureau,” Olson told county officials at the National Association of Counties annual conference in 2019. “Put out the message that it’s safe. Because people are afraid.”

Ron Jarmin, the bureau’s current deputy director, told Government Executive in 2021 while he was serving as acting director that the Trump administration’s push was “never that big” of an issue. Trump officials were helpful to the bureau “in some ways,” added Jarmin, a career Census employee since 1992, and each presidential administration is "always a mixed bag."

"The citizenship question and wanting to exclude some people from apportionment, those were distractions and caused some folks on the staff to have to deal with legal cases and what have you," Jarmin said. "But by and large, operationally, we were able to keep the folks who were actually doing the census focused on their work."

Watchdogs, including the Commerce Department’s inspector general and the Government Accountability Office, found the Trump administration’s interventions created significant vulnerabilities to the quality of the census. GAO found the faster turnaround time to deliver results of the count would put data quality at risk, an issue it said was exacerbated by Trump's decision to require Census to weed out non-citizens without legal residence in the United States from its apportionment data.

Census last included a citizenship question on its standard questionnaire in its decennial count in 1950. In rejecting Trump’s efforts in 2019, the Supreme Court suggested Congress has the authority to require a citizenship question but found the administration’s justifications were insufficient and “contrived” to legitimize a predetermined outcome. 

Ahead of Wednesday’s vote, Democrats derided the effort as unconstitutional. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, told the House Rules Committee on Tuesday the bill was a waste of time given its prospects in the Senate and served only to discourage census participation. 

“This bill is an affront to the great Radical Republicans who wrote the original Constitution and the 14th amendment, which has always made persons, not voters, the basis for reapportionment,” Raskin said. “This bill would destroy the accuracy of the census, which may have something to do with its real legislative motivation.”