CREW opposes Census Bureau’s exclusion effort and collection of data pertaining to legal status

The Census Bureau should withdraw its proposal to redefine “usual residence” and thus exclude certain people in the United States from the apportionment count and its proposal to collect information about legal status by adding a question to the decennial census or by relying on interagency data-sharing agreements, according to CREW’s comment submitted to the Bureau.

The Fourteenth Amendment requires every person to be counted for apportionment, the process of using data from the decennial census to distribute the 435 seats of the House of Representatives among all 50 states. Adding a question on legal status would disproportionately impact minority and immigrant communities and result in incomplete and inaccurate data. When the census does not accurately reflect the population of the states, undercounted areas face not only underrepresentation in Congress, but also the risk of losing significant resources for basic services such as roads, schools, hospitals and public health programs.

If a household does not respond to the census, the Census Bureau then has to expend additional resources by training and sending out census takers to manually collect responses. These responses are less likely to produce accurate results, and the Census Bureau has not explained how it would manage additional local outreach when it has lost nearly one-fifth of its staff.

In addition, the Bureau’s proposal to rely on information collected from data-sharing agreements lacks adequate transparency and risks using unreliable data. CREW requested information regarding the Census Bureau’s and DHS’s data sharing agreements and policies under the Freedom of Information Act, but to date DHS has not provided copies of any agreements currently in place, stating that they are unable to identify any agreements in response to the request. This lack of transparency is even more concerning in light of a questionable report from the Census Bureau about noncitizen voting numbers and the government’s persistent efforts to collect sensitive information on legal status to create a seemingly illegal national voter database.

Because the proposed rule appears to be unlawful and would disproportionately impact immigrant communities, the Census Bureau should withdraw it.