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Amee Vanderpool at SHERO:
Republicans on the House Appropriation Committee revealed a new funding bill on Monday that will revive a conservative initiative to ban the Census Bureau from including non-citizens without legal status in the 2030 apportionment counts. A House Appropriations subcommittee voted 9-6, along party lines, on Tuesday to advance the bill in an ongoing attempt to advantage their political party by excluding millions of non-citizens from the 2030 census. One of those three bills, referred to as the Equal Representation Act (H.R. 7109), calls for excluding "individuals who are not citizens of the United States" by adding a citizenship question to the decennial Census, which would directly affect the apportionment of Representatives. That measure passed in the House of Representatives on May 8, 2024, by a vote of 206-202. It has since been received in the US Senate and placed on the calendar, but has yet to pass in that chamber.
Another piece of legislation proposes excluding all non-citizens, including green card and visa holders, from the 2030 Census count entirely. Since none of the bills seek to exclude the counting of non-citizens in the overall census numbers that are used to distribute trillions in federal funding to local communities for public services each year, this latest Republican push to reapportion representation serves an entirely political purpose. The House bills put forth on the Appropriations Committee also require the Census to ask about people's immigration status, which could have substantial implications for minority groups who are concerned about federal repercussions from the Trump administration through his Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency. Putting an immigration question on the 2030 Census will have a chilling effect on people who fear political retaliation, and this will mean many minority communities will be undercounted. That will ultimately result in less local and state funding for communities. The legal issue of whether Congress can add these kinds of questions to the next Census is a complex one, which is why Republicans are advancing a bill that seeks to exclude people who are included in the count if they are unable to ask about citizenship directly. When the first Trump administration attempted to sway the Census count by asking the question, "Is this a person a citizen of the United States?" the US Supreme Court blocked the addition of US citizenship status to 2020 census forms.
Republicans seek to push bills manipulating the 2030 US Census count to ban the counting of non-citizens in an attempt to rig the US House, state legislative seats, and the Electoral College.