Trump Admin Wants To Exclude Non-Citizens And Eliminate Race From US Census [Op-Ed]

Welp, President Donald Trump is trying to change the U.S. Census again. He and his administration want it to reflect a U.S. populace that excludes undocumented immigrants and noncitizens without permanent residency, and is racially homogeneous — because if America can’t be a virtually all-white nation, the least the president can do is pretend all that racial and cultural diversity doesn’t exist via the Census Bureau.

According to the Washington Post, the proposal was posted to the federal register on Wednesday. It suggests adding a citizenship question to the decennial questionnaire, which Trump has wanted since his first term. The proposal also argues that the census should exclude all non-citizens whether they’re documented or not, because they are “not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a ‘usual residence’ in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States.”

According to the proposal, the questionnaire should not include questions about race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. It argues the survey “should be colorblind and should not be distorted in any way by questions about immaterial personal characteristics.”

This is coming from the same administration that has made it a priority to tackle anti-white discrimination and only anti-white discrimination (that structurally does not exist, btw), and has made anti-DEI propaganda its favorite kind of propaganda, along with anti-immigrant propaganda, election interference propaganda, and crime propaganda, of course. Trump is also the same president who signed an executive order that required federal agencies to stop using “disparate impact” data to identify discriminatory policies and practices that disproportionately harm certain groups, namely Black people and other people of color. He also signed a similar order discouraging school administrators from using “disparate impact” data to address racial disparities in disciplinary actions taken against students, labeling it a DEI practice. Basically, the point is to make racial discrimination great again by eliminating race from the conversation, but not the outcome.

And that’s exactly what’s happening here. That’s why Trump wants to prohibit the Census from collecting data on race and ethnicity, which it has done since 1790. The Census helps determine what areas receive certain funding, like funding allocated for certain marginalized groups. Take race out of the equation and suddenly neighborhoods full of targeted groups in the global majority (that’s us, not them, and that’s what they’re afraid of), and those groups could lose out on said funding.

Don’t believe me? Well, what if Trump has indicated as much himself?

From the Post:

Trump has for years pushed to alter how the American population is tallied every decade, including unsuccessful efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. The Supreme Court ultimately froze that plan, saying Trump officials had provided a “contrived” reason for wanting such information.

Trump later said the citizenship question was needed to affect the redistricting process, an argument the Justice Department did not use in its legal defense. Census results every 10 years determine how the House’s 435 seats are allocated among states.

“Number one, you need it for Congress — you need it for Congress for districting,” Trump said in 2019. “You need it for appropriations — where are the funds going? How many people are there? Are they citizens? Are they not citizens? You need it for many reasons.”

It’s not just that Trump wants to make sure no funding goes anywhere that has a concentration of non-citizens; he wants “colorblind” funding. In the language of white conservatives, “colorblind” always means a default to whiteness, if not in its intent, then in its result.

And, of course, Trump’s latest bid to change how the U.S. Census operates will likely face a multitude of legal challenges, as it is almost certainly unconstitutional. The 14th Amendment — that same pesky amendment that protects birthright citizenship, which we all know Trump just loves — holds that representatives in Congress be apportioned to states based on “the whole number of persons in each state.” The amendment does not specify citizenship or immigration status, although it does exclude “Indians not taxed.”

“The Constitution is clear. Every person living in the United States, regardless of immigration status, must be counted in the census,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led a successful lawsuit, thwarting Trump’s efforts to change the 2020 Census.  “We stopped the Trump administration’s census attacks in 2020, and we’re exploring our legal options to fight back again. 

Trump and his ilk do not seem to love America the way they say they do. They don’t love its constitution, and they don’t love its racial, ethnic, and cultural makeup.

If they don’t like it here, maybe they should leave.

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