The Trump Administration’s Census -Xenophobic Motives Documented
Last month, we challenged the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census — essentially a door-to-door federal inquiry of the citizenship status of every member of every household in the country. On Thursday, we received welcome news from a federal judge that the lawsuit can continue. The judge’s decision, in part, was based on an explosive set of documents we obtained from the government. These documents reveal that the Trump administration’s public explanation as to why it needs this information is a sham to conceal its discriminatory, anti-immigrant agenda, and they also prove that a prominent member of President Trump’s cabinet lied under sworn oath to Congress…
…Documents uncovered in our case have revealed that attacking immigrant communities is, in fact, the administration’s goal, spearheaded by two of President Trump’s most prominent anti-immigrant ideologues, and that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross lied to Congress in an attempt to cover up this fact.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/voting-rights/trump-administrations-census-cover
Together, all of these documents reveal that the fix was in. To recap:
In April 2017, Kris Kobach, at the direction of Steven Bannon, pitched the idea of the citizenship question to Ross.
In May 2017, Ross was already “mystified” that a citizenship question had not yet been added to the census, and an aide responded by reassuring him that they will “get that in place” as well as explaining the plan to plant the request with the Justice Department: “We need to work with Justice to get them to request that citizenship be added.” [Emphasis mine]
In September 2017, the Justice Department assured Commerce “we can do whatever you all need,” leading to a meeting between Sessions and Ross on the issue.All of this took place months before the Justice Department requested that the Census Bureau add a question on citizenship to the 2020 Census — which appears to be nothing more than a cover-up for the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda. And Secretary Ross appears to have personally participated in that cover-up when he misled Congress by testifying on March 22, 2018, that “[t]he Department of Justice, as you know, initiated the request.”