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.
… The Official Story
Here’s the official story, according to the Trump administration, of how a citizenship question came to be added to the census, in three parts.
First, on December 12, 2017, Arthur Gary, a Trump appointee in the Department of Justice, wrote a letter to the acting head of the Census Bureau, Ron Jarmin, requesting that a question on citizenship be included in the 2020 Decennial Census. The ostensible reason was that such information “is critical to the Department’s enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and its important protections against racial discrimination in voting.”
The Census Bureau is part of the Department of Commerce, which leads to the second step in the story. On March 22, 2018, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross testified before Congress under oath that this December 2017 request was the beginning of the process for considering the inclusion of a question on citizenship in the Decennial Census, stating that “[t]he Department of Justice, as you know, initiated the request.”
…The Real Story
[after several emails back and forth with Wilbur Ross about follow through on placing a citizenship question on the 2020 Census form starting 9 months prior to the DOJ letter, in March 2017] … On May 2, 2017, Secretary Ross wrote an email to an aide stating that he was “mystified why nothing have [sic] been done in response to my months old request that we include the citizenship question.”
The aide responded with an email that amounts to a smoking gun. He reassured Ross that they “will get that in place” and explained the plan: They would plant a request with the Justice Department: “We need to work with Justice to get them to request that citizenship be added…”
Two months later, Secretary Ross received an email, solving the mystery of whom Steve Bannon sent to talk to Ross about the census. It was none other than the Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has long pushed an anti-immigrant agenda.
On July 14, 2017, Kobach sent an email to Ross “following up on our telephone discussion from a few months ago… we talked about the fact the US census does not currently ask respondents about their citizenship.”
By August 8, Ross was growing impatient and indicated in an email to an aide that he was prepared to call Attorney General Jeff Sessions directly…
The following day, the aide assured Ross that a memo on the citizenship question was coming his way:
A month later, the pressure appeared to have paid off. On September 18, a Justice Department aide wrote to Commerce official Wendy Teramoto stating that “we can do whatever you all need us to do…. The AG is eager to assist.” Ross and Sessions then met.
… 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.”
Hearseeno 