What You Need to Know About the Citizenship Question and the Census

The Trump administration said Tuesday that it wouldn’t ask about citizenship on the 2020 census after a Supreme Court decision last week blocked its efforts to add the question.

CreditCreditBrian Snyder/Reuters

The Trump administration said Tuesday that it would begin printing forms for the 2020 census that do not include a question about citizenship, abandoning its quest to add the query after being blocked last week by the Supreme Court.

The decision was a victory for critics who said asking people whether they are American citizens would skew the census results in favor of Republicans.

The administration was compelled to make the decision after a majority of justices rejected its justification for adding a citizenship question, which the justices said “appears to have been contrived.” The court left open the possibility that the administration could provide an adequate argument, but with a looming deadline to begin printing census forms, Justice Department lawyers said Tuesday that the administration would not continue to plead its case.

The Trump administration had argued that including the citizenship question on census forms was an important part of its efforts to protect the voting rights of the nation’s minority residents. But opponents said that including the question would deter many immigrants and their families, both legal and undocumented, from participating in the census, which could have the effect of shifting political power among the states and between the major political parties.

Here are answers to some key questions about the issue.



The Justice Department said it wanted the question included in the census because it needed to have a better idea of how many Americans are eligible to vote. The government said it needed that information to enforce the Voting Rights Act, which bars discrimination against racial or language minority groups in the conduct of elections.

That may seem uncontroversial, but critics said it was far from the whole story. They dismissed the voting-rights argument, saying the government’s current estimate of the number of voting-age American citizens would be sufficient for that purpose. They said the citizenship question was actually a central element of a Republican strategy to try to shift political boundaries to the party’s advantage when the states begin using the new census to redraw their district maps in 2021.

Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, has said that he ordered that the citizenship question be added to the standard 2020 census form solely in response to a December 2017 request from the Justice Department. But three federal trial judges ruled that the evidence in the record demonstrated that Mr. Ross was not telling the truth. He had decided long before to add the question, the judges found, and then pressed the Justice Department to supply a rationale.

Opponents say the citizenship question was intended to frighten noncitizens away from participating in the census, whether they were in the country legally or not. The American Civil Liberties Union said that it would make the count less accurate, and would have the effect of diverting federal money and political power away from states and cities where larger numbers of noncitizens tend to live and into the hands of rural areas.


By one government estimate, about 6.5 million people might not have been counted if the citizenship question had appeared on census forms. Courts have found that Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas might have each lost seats in the House as a result.




Some do, including Canada, Australia, Ireland, Germany and Mexico, and the United Nations recommends the practice. The United States used to ask some respondents about citizenship as well, but since 1950, the question has not been included in the census forms that most people receive. (A much longer, more detailed questionnaire is sent to a small sample of households chosen at random.)



