Today, House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) released the following statement on the Trump Administration’s decision to include a question about citizenship in the 2020 Census:

“More than fifty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans are still trying to disenfranchise voters and manipulate the process for partisan political advantage. With the rollback of Section 5 preclearance under the VRA following the Shelby County v. Holder case in 2013, Republicans have pursued an aggressive strategy of targeted disenfranchisement through harsh voter identification laws, built on the myth of voter fraud.  Researchers have found that these laws produced dramatic results, decreasing Latino turnout by nine points, African-American turnout by 8.6 points and Asian-Americans by 12.5 points.

“The Administration is now ironically claiming that an inquiry around immigration status for the 2020 census is under the pretext of voting rights enforcement.  This claim is laughable coming from an Administration with a record of blatant disregard and continuous rolling back of civil rights enforcement.

“Given this Administration's zeal for anti-immigration enforcement, asking for citizenship information will frighten many immigrants from answering the census, and is guaranteed—and intended—to produce a census not counting a large part of the immigrant population, thus skewing the census against areas, like cities, with large immigrant populations.”

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