IN ROLLBACK OF TRUMP’S EFFORTS ON CENSUS, BIDEN ADMIN SCRAPS LOCAL TABULATION

WASHINGTON: The US Census Bureau is suspending efforts to create neighbourhood-level statistics on the citizenship and age of residents, using 2020 census data, in the latest rollback of Trump administration censusrelated initiatives that critics feared would be used to favour Republicans and whites during the drawing of state and local districts.

As part of an order President Joe Biden signed Wednesday on the 2020 census, the Census Bureau said on Friday that it would discontinue efforts to create citizenship tabulations at the city-block level using 2020 census data combined with administrative records.

Among his first acts as president, Biden’s order revoked two Trump directives related to the 2020 census. The first attempted to discern the citizenship status of every US resident through administrative records, and the second sought to exclude people in the US illegally from the numbers used for apportioning congressional seats among the states. Trump’s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, had ordered the production of the block-level citizenship data in 2018.

The Census Bureau said none of the data from the 2020 census would include information on citizenship or immigration status, at any geographic level. Citizen Voting Age by Race and Ethnicity data were created two decades ago to help assess whether minority communities were getting equal opportunities.