The U.S. Census Bureau has stopped working on a Trump administration-initiated project to produce citizenship data that could have politically benefited Republicans when voting districts are redrawn.
Citing President Biden’s executive order that revoked President Donald Trump’s directive for federal agencies to share their citizenship records, the bureau updated its website Friday with a statement that says its work on anonymized data about the U.S. citizenship status of every adult living in the country has been “suspended indefinitely.”
This change means that states will likely not get access to the citizenship data needed to carry out a radically different way of remaking political maps that determine the areas lawmakers represent. A GOP strategist had concluded that using block-level citizen voting age population, or CVAP, data for redistricting “would be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”
“The Census Bureau will review with the Voting Section of the Department of Justice whether the current format and granularity of the CVAP tabulation based on the American Community Survey continues to meet their statistical requirements,” one of the new statements on the bureau’s website said.
The Trump administration’s citizenship data project is facing an ongoing federal lawsuit led by attorneys with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Asian Americans Advancing Justice – AAJC.
Speaking to NPR shortly after the release of Biden’s executive order, Thomas Saenz, MALDEF’s president and general counsel, indicated that the legal challenge — which alleges that the data project was intended to discriminate against Latinos and noncitizens — may be ending soon.
“There are still many months before the redistricting data is released, so I think we’ll have an opportunity to determine where we are and resolve the case,” Saenz said Wednesday. “What President Biden did is a strong indication that we will be able to resolve this case in a way that is respectful of the Constitution.”
Asked whether the Justice Department believes that using block-level citizenship data would be more appropriate than estimates for redistricting, DOJ spokesperson Kristina Mastropasqua wrote in an email Thursday: “No comment.”
