Supreme Court blocks census citizenship question. Here’s what that means for Texas.
Are you a U.S. citizen?
That’s a question you likely won’t see when you receive the 2020 Census questionnaire, after the Supreme Court ruled Thursday morning.
In a complicated ruling, the court decided on a 5-4 vote that the question, proposed by President Donald Trump’s administration, cannot be included in the 2020 questionnaire for now.
“What was provided here was more of a distraction,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in a ruling that said the administration’s reasoning for adding the question was inadequate.
The case was sent back to a lower court, but it remains to be seen if the Commerce Department will be able to present a justifiable reason to add the question before census forms need to be printed.
On Twitter, President Donald Trump said it was “totally ridiculous” that the government was barred from asking the question.
“I have asked the lawyers if they can delay the Census, no matter how long, until the United States Supreme Court is given additional information from which it can make a final and decisive decision on this very critical matter,” Trump tweeted.
If the question had been added, households with non-citizens would be less likely to participate in the constitutionally mandated survey that influences states’ money and power, U.S. Census Bureau research found.
The ramifications of an undercount would have been strongly felt in Texas, where a little more than 10% of residents were non-citizens between 2013 and 2017.
“The Supreme Court made the right decision in deciding that they will not allow the Trump Administration to weaponize our census and exclude literally millions of people living in America from being counted and represented,” said U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth, whose district stretches from Fort Worth to Dallas and includes a number of residents believed to be non-citizens.
The issue turned the upcoming headcount into the most debated in decades, triggering federal lawsuits and congressional fights amid predictions of undercounts, especially in Texas, which is home to about 3 million immigrants, and Tarrant County, which has nearly 200,000 non-citizens.
The census count helps determine how federal funds from 55 major spending programs are distributed to states, communities and households annually for the next decade. In 2016, those funds totaled around $883 billion.
A skewed count also could have affected the upcoming federal reapportioning of new House districts. There are 36 House seats in Texas.
And all that affects Electoral College votes, which are based on each state’s count of House and Senate seats.
“Because there’s been so much exploding growth in Texas, we have the opportunity to gain up to three more congressional seats if everyone is counted,” said Ann Beeson, the CEO of the Austin-based think tank Center for Public Policy Priorities. “By not counting certain populations, you’re diminishing, directly, the democratic representation of those same populations.”
Tarrant County alone could have received one fewer House seat, if the question had been added, political observers estimate.
Census forms will be distributed in March.
Under the Trump plan, a person living alone will be asked eight questions on the census form, including name, address, age and race. No longer will the questionnaire also be able to ask: “Are you a citizen of the United States?”
Texas data
Earlier this month, Gov. Greg Abbott told the Austin American-Statesman that he supports adding the citizenship question to the census, noting that any concerns about an undercount are “nothing other than conjecture.”
“It seems like it would yield valuable information,” Abbott told the paper.
About 10.8% of Texas residents were non-citizens between 2013 and 2017, much higher than the national average, census figures show.
In 23 Texas counties, at least 15% of the population was not a citizen. The largest of those counties were Dallas (434,000 non-citizens) and Harris (765,000 non-citizens).
If one-tenth of Texas’s 3 million non-citizens skipped the census because of the citizenship question, it could have led to an undercount of about 300,000 residents.
Census estimates come from the American Community Survey, or ACS, which the Census Bureau sends every year to more than 3 million households. About one in 12 foreign-born respondents nationwide filled out part of the ACS in 2017 but left blank the question about citizenship.
The federal government uses the census to determine how to distribute billions of dollars. When one state shrinks in proportion to the others, it stands to lose federal funding, and vice versa.
According to the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy, the census was the basis for allocating $59 billion in federal funding to Texas during 2016. That averages out to about $2,100 per Texas resident that year. Most of that money is funneled to low-income residents through programs such as Medicaid and food stamps.
In fiscal year 2018, more than 500 federal programs provided grants to state and local government entities in Texas, according to an April 2019 Legislative Budget Board report. In 1993, federal funds made up 28.2% of the total state budget that fiscal year. In 2018, that number rose to 33%, according to the report.
State agencies, like the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the state’s Medicaid program and receives more than half of Texas’ federal funds, are among those that could have been impacted if the question had been added.
In 2016, Texas received nearly $26.7 billion in federal funds for Medicaid — the most for any program in the state. If those funds decreased, doctors will have to try and serve more people with less resources, and it could have forced local municipalities to make tough choices about where to spend their money, Beeson said.
George Washington University researcher Andrew Reamer calculated that a 5.8% undercount of non-citizens in Texas would have cost the state roughly $138 million in Medicaid funding alone during 2015.
Tarrant impact
Citizenship has been a front-burner issue recently, as Tarrant County was on the political front line of one of the president’s immigration enforcement promises.
Locals marched and testified — and some even publicly identified themselves as non-citizens — as county officials debated whether to continue participating in a federal program that lets sheriff’s deputies work as ICE agents.
In the end, officials narrowly decided to keep participating in the program for a year.
“I know that fear exists ... for that, I am very, very sorry,” Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley said at a June 18 meeting where the vote occurred. “I wish Congress would get off the dime and get (an immigration policy) taken care of.”
Across the country, complete count census committees have been created to raise awareness about the need for people to fill out the Census and return it when people receive it next year.
These committees, which will focus on typically hard-to-count communities, are in cities including Fort Worth and Arlington.
The Census
Answers provided to the Census Bureau can’t be used against respondents in court or by government agencies such as immigration officials. But the agency will be publishing data showing how many non-citizens live in each neighborhood.
“People are afraid their information will be misused and will target undocumented households,” said JoAnna Cardoza, who serves on Arlington’s Census County Committee and as LULAC’s deputy district director for women. “There’s fear.”
Some non-citizens are unauthorized immigrants. Others are here legally as permanent residents with Green Cards, or with temporary work visas, or under other protected legal status.
A 2018 study for the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality found decreasing numbers of survey respondents have been answering the citizenship question annually between 2010 and 2016, notably among Asian Americans and Hispanics.
A McClatchy News review found that the number of foreign-born residents who didn’t answer the survey’s citizenship question rose again in 2017, the first year of the Trump presidency.
This story was originally published June 27, 2019 at 10:10 AM.
