Citizenship study cut from census by Biden
The U.S. Census Bureau is suspending efforts to create neighborhood-level statistics on the citizenship and age of residents, using 2020 census data, in the latest rollback of Trump administration census-related initiatives that critics feared would be used to favor Republicans and whites during the drawing of state and local districts.
As part of an order President Joe Biden signed Wednesday on last year’s count, the bureau said 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 U.S. resident through administrative records, and the second sought to exclude people in the U.S. illegally from the numbers used for apportioning congressional seats among the states.
Trump’s commerce secretary had ordered the production of the blocklevel citizenship data in 2018.
After Wednesday’s order by Biden, 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 almost two decades ago to help assess whether minority communities were getting equal opportunities to elect candidates of their choice. The data currently comes from American Community Survey estimates.
“This is a major step towards an honest and fair redistricting process, helping ensure that everyone is represented in new districts,” Jeffrey Wice, a Democratic redistricting expert, said of Biden’s order.