The Battle Over THE CENSUS: The decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 Census has prompted a massive fight over the once-a-decade national count.

• Author: Smith, Patricia

The question seems simple enough at first glance: Are you a citizen?

But that question, which the Trump administration wants to add to the 2020 Census, has caused an enormous uproar. Nineteen states, a number of cities, and a variety of immigrant groups have filed six separate lawsuits to block the question from appearing on the once-a-decade national head count that will be conducted next year.

Those who oppose the citizenship question say that it will be so intimidating to immigrants--both legal and undocumented ones--that many will skip responding to the census altogether. And that, they say, could lead to a wildly inaccurate count with massive repercussions for the nation.

"What the Trump administration is requesting is not just alarming, it is an unconstitutional attempt to discourage an accurate census count," says Xavier Becerra, attorney general for California, one of the states suing to have the citizenship question removed.

The Trump administration, in announcing the addition of the citizenship question last spring, said it needs the data to better enable the Department of Justice to enforce voting laws. Having a more accurate count of citizens nationwide, officials say, would help them calculate the number of people eligible to vote in each state.

"I would think that's a very reasonable thing," then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Congress last April, "and I think concerns over it are overblown."

The administration also points out that a citizenship question was routinely part of the census through 1950. President Trump tweeted recently that the census would be "meaningless" without the "all important Citizenship Question."

The United States Census is more than just a count of the nation's population. It's a snapshot of America that determines everything from how many seats in Congress each state gets to how federal money is distributed and whether a new H&M opens near your house (see "What Is the Census Used For?" p. 17).

It all goes back to the Constitution, which requires the federal government to count the nation's residents every 10 years. It's been faithfully doing so since 1790. That first year, 650 census workers were instructed to track down every living person in the original 13 states. In 2020, the Census Bureau expects to hire 350,000 people to go door-to-door to interview those who don't send back the questionnaires that are mailed to every address in the nation. In their quest to tally every last person, census workers have been known to use snowmobiles to get to remote Alaskan villages and lobster boats to reach distant islands off the coast of Maine.

The Constitution calls for a count of all citizens and noncitizens living in the U.S. in order to redistribute the 435 seats in the House of Representatives, which are allocated based on population. (Places with expanding populations gain representatives, and those with declining populations lose them.)

"The Founding Fathers wanted everyone to participate, whether you were a citizen or not," says Robert Groves, provost of Georgetown University and a former director of the Census Bureau.

Suing the Government

This year, a number of states and advocacy groups are worried that the addition of the citizenship question might put that goal of universal participation at risk. So worried, in fact, that they took legal action soon after the citizenship question was announced, accusing Trump administration officials of violating the constitutional requirement to count everyone. The largest of the lawsuits--in which 18* states, the District of Columbia, and some cities and advocacy groups are suing the Trump administration--notes that the Census Bureau has warned for decades that questioning residents about their immigration status or citizenship would "inevitably jeopardize the overall accuracy of the population count."

Over the last six months, federal judges in New York, California, and Maryland have ruled against allowing the citizenship question, and the Trump administration has appealed to the Supreme Court. Last month, the justices heard arguments in the New York case. A ruling is expected before summer, when the printing of the census forms is scheduled to begin.

Fears Among Immigrants

How all these legal proceedings shake out could have an enormous impact. A little more than half of the nation's 44.5 million immigrants are not U.S. citizens. Of those non-citizens, a little more than half have visas or green cards that allow them to reside in the U.S. legally, and about 11 million of them are undocumented. But demographers worry that any U.S. household with at least one person who's not a citizen will be less likely to...