President Trump, speaking at the White House on Thursday, announced that he would “immediately” issue an executive order to get an accurate count of non-citizens and citizens in the United States — a measure Trump said would be “far more accurate” than relying on a citizenship question in the 2020 census.
The move would make use of “vast” federal databases and free up information sharing among all federal agencies concerning who they know is living in the country, Trump said.
“Today I’m here to say we are not backing down in our effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population,” the president told reporters in the Rose Garden, after slamming “far-left Democrats” seeking to “conceal the number of illegal aliens in our midst.”
“We will leave no stone unturned,” Trump asserted. He called legal opposition to adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census “meritless,” but said the ongoing judicial morass in several federal district courts made it logistically impossible to resolve the matter before the 2020 census forms needed to be printed.
Speaking after Trump, Attorney General Bill Barr said the information collected via the executive order could be useful in determining the makeup of the Electoral College and congressional apportionment.
“That information will be used for countless purposes. For example, there is a current dispute over whether illegal aliens can be included for apportionment purposes. … We will be studying this issue,” Barr said.
Census counts — which by law include illegal immigrants — have been used to determine the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives for the next 10 years, the number of electors afforded each state in the Electoral College and the distribution of some $675 billion in federal spending.
The Census Bureau’s own experts have said requiring information about citizenship would discourage illegal immigrants from participating and lead to a less accurate count. That, in turn, would redistribute money and political power away from many cities led by Democrats where immigrants tend to cluster.
Barr also agreed with Trump that the Supreme Court decision last month posed insurmountable “logistical” — but not “legal” — barriers to asking the citizenship question on the census. The government already has started the lengthy and expensive process of printing the census questionnaire without the question.
Additionally, Barr slammed media reports that the White House would issue an executive order in an attempt to illegally force a citizenship question on the census. “In the hysterical mode of the day,” Barr said, media outlets speculated that Trump simply would add the question to the census unilaterally.
“This has never been under consideration,” Barr said.
Many Democrats promptly characterized the president’s move as a “retreat,” and condemned the news conference. Others vowed to consider challenging the executive order in court.
“President Trump is so intent on intimidating communities of color that even when the courts and rule of law thwart him, he still tries to persist in his ham-handed ways,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement. “The president’s retreat on adding the misguided citizen question to the census was long overdue and is a significant victory for democracy and fair representation. Every person must be counted and no one should be intimidated by the president and his capricious behavior.”
Trump had emphasized his exasperation at the situation earlier in the day at a White House conference focused on social media censorship of conservatives.
“We spend $20 billion on a census,” Trump told attendees. “They go through houses, they go up, they ring doorbells, they talk to people. How many toilets do they have? How many desks do they have? How many beds? What’s their roof made of? The only thing we can’t ask is, are you a citizen of the United States. Isn’t it the craziest thing?”
The census is vital to the make up of our government and electoral process, required by the constitution. Now as democrats seem to only represent illegal aliens in their platform and the bogus 12 million illegal number that has not been updated in many years. The number of representatives varies because it is determined by the population of the state.
As citizens flee both NY and Cali the representation should be accountable.
The left is deathly afraid of an accurate census that tells how many illegal immigrants they have let into the country. They have also invested a lot of taxpayer’s money bloating their residency rolls with illegal immigrants to inflate their representation power.
Either way, it’s bad for liberals. If we find out how many illegals are actually here, the citizenry will demand action. If sanctuary cities and states lose representation based on those counts, they have all the expense and crime and none of the benefits. Same goes for if illegal immigrants refuse to be counted.
No wonder the left, once again, fears the truth and fact.