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Demonstrators rally at the Supreme Court in April 2019 to protest a proposal to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

The Trump administration announced on July 21 that it will exclude undocumented immigrants from the 2020 Census data used to reapportion the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives among the 50 states, by matching Census data with administrative records. The administration “will not support giving congressional representation to aliens who enter or remain in the country unlawfully, because doing so would create perverse incentives and undermine our system of government. Just as we do not give political power to people who are here temporarily, we should not give political power to people who should not be here at all.“

The Supreme Court precedent has interpreted the Constitution as requiring congressional districts to be appointed by total population. In its unanimous 2016 decision on Evenwel v. Abbott, the high court stated that the apportionment of legislative districts should be based on total population, rather than that of citizens or voters, under the Fourteenth Amendment. In Justice Ginsberg’s words that quoted a historic precedent, “women, children, and other non-voting classes may have as vital an interest in the legislation of the country as those who actually deposit the ballot.”

The Trump administration has long sought to use the census as a vehicle to identify, and possibly limit the political power of, undocumented immigrants. In 2018, the administration said it would ask respondents to the 2020 census whether they were citizens, a move ultimately rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, the bigger problem is that up to 20 million U.S. citizens could incorrectly be lumped together with undocumented immigrants due to matching errors. Such errors are likely to be greater in low-income urban and rural communities, thereby exacerbating any undercount that may occur in those communities and reducing their voting power relative to more affluent communities. 

To date, the Trump administration and the Census Bureau have offered only limited information on how the matching will happen or how to address difficulties in the process. This lack of transparency could further reduce trust not only in the Census, but also in the fairness of our political system.