Dems Blast Trump Effort to Exclude Undocumented Immigrants From Census Counts

The president last week instructed the Census Bureau to calculate a new set of population data to use in the rebalancing of U.S. House seats among the states. The new numbers would include only U.S. citizens and foreigners living in the country legally, but not unauthorized immigrants. It would be the first time that the Census used two sets of books to measure the full population and the population for reapportioning the U.S. House. There's one big hitch in Trump's plans, though: The Census Bureau isn't asking people about their citizenship status in the 2020 count, because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that the Trump administration could not do so. U.S. House Democrats and several former directors of the U.S. Census Bureau, who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations, warned that the move from the Trump administration could discourage immigrants from participating in the survey altogether. That would further jeopardize the success of the Census, which is already running several months behind because of the coronavirus pandemic…. "This is not a Democratic power-grab," countered U.S. Rep. John Sarbanes, a Democrat who represents Maryland's 3rd District. "This is a patriotic process we engage in every 10 years… What we're hearing [from former Census directors] is that the politics need to be kept away from this space. The president is trying to politicize it. We need to keep it in a safe zone."