Attorney General TJ Donovan joined several fellow attorneys general and other Democrats on Tuesday in sharply criticizing a Trump administration plan to include a question about citizenship in the 2020 U.S. Census.
“I have serious concerns about adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census and have resolved to join a coalition of other states to oppose those efforts,” Donovan said in a statement released Tuesday by his office.
“A citizenship question would significantly depress participation and result in an undercount of states’ populations,” the attorney general added.
Donovan’s statement stopped short of saying Vermont would be a co-plaintiff with other states suing to block the move by the Census Bureau, which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
California filed suit shortly after the Census announcement was released late Monday. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced Tuesday his office would lead a multi-state lawsuit, and Donovan spokeswoman Natalie Silver said Tuesday evening that Vermont planned to join the New York-led suit when it is filed.
Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, charged that adding a citizenship question to the Census for the first time in decades was raw politics, and was designed to intimidate undocumented residents from participating in the Census and produce undercounts of the population in states that often support Democrats.
“In raw political terms, it has been estimated that an undercount feared by Democrats could cost California at least one seat in the House of Representatives and, on the national level, shift political power from cities to more rural communities with the benefits falling to the Republican Party,” The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
In an interview with the Post, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the data could help identify potential voting-rights violations by providing more accurate information than currently available about the proportion of a congressional district’s population that is eligible to vote by virtue of holding citizenship. The Census Bureau currently gathers information about citizenship from a survey that samples a small percentage of the population.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told CNN the change was “necessary for the Department of Justice to protect voters, specifically to help us better comply with the Voting Rights Act, which is something that’s important and a part of this process.”
The Hill reported that more than a million undocumented immigrants live in the New York area, and 1 million more live in Los Angeles, according to a 2017 study by the Pew Research Center. Chicago, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Denver and four California metro areas all have between 100,000 and 400,000 undocumented immigrant residents.
Not just blue states could be affected. Federal funding for a range of programs geared to overall population counts could be cut for cities including Houston, Dallas, Austin, Atlanta, Miami, Orlando and Phoenix, which all have large populations of undocumented residents. Those cities are in states carried by President Donald Trump in 2016.
Donovan said that “Vermont, which already has a small population, cannot afford a last-minute change to the Census that would threaten federal funding, create an environment of fear and send our fellow Vermonters into the shadows.”
