Maryland Moves To Block Citizenship Question On 2020 Census

Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, flanked by the Legislature’s Latino Caucus and representatives of other minority caucuses, announced Thursday that Maryland would join 19 other states in filing a lawsuit to prevent President Donald Trump, a Republican, from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S. Census.

Adding such a question is “intended to drive people underground and prevent them from answering the census,” Frosh, a Democrat, said.

The U.S. Department of Justice in 2017 asked the Census Bureau to reinstate the citizenship question, citing the need for better data to enforce the Voting Rights Act.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, in a March letter explaining his decision, said the benefits of the added data outweighed potential consequences — like a reduced response rate.

About 20 percent of Marylanders chose not to respond to the last census in 2010, Frosh said. He expects even fewer will respond if citizenship status is added to the 2020 questionnaire.

Among other functions, the census is used to determine how many representatives each state is allowed in Congress and how much aid states get from the federal government.

Frosh said that adding a citizenship question puts “literally billions of dollars at stake for the state of Maryland.”

Delegate Maricé Morales, D-Montgomery and vice chair of the Legislative Latino Caucus, said there are approximately 200,000 undocumented immigrants in Maryland.

But a change in the census questionnaire could discourage a wider range of Maryland residents — including those with green cards and some American citizens — from participating, Frosh said.

When you deter one person from answering the census, you risk losing an entire household, Morales said. She described a scenario in which a household might have both citizens and undocumented immigrants.

About 15 percent of Marylanders were born abroad, while 11 percent were born in the United States but have an immigrant parent, according to the American Immigration Council.

“We need to be counted, not undercounted,” said Sen. Susan Lee, D-Montgomery and chair of the Legislative Asian-American and Pacific-Islander Caucus. “People of all different backgrounds built America, and we need to go forward, not backwards.”

More than half a century has passed since the U.S. Census included a question about citizenship.

“The census was designed to count all people, regardless of immigration status,” Morales said.

— By Sean Whooley, Alex Mann and Zach Shapiro, CAPITAL NEWS SERVICE

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