Norton Announces Bill to Ban Citizenship Question on 2020 Census

WASHINGTON, DC – Ahead of a congressional oversight hearing on the 2020 census tomorrow, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) today introduced a bill to prohibit the Census Bureau from including questions on citizenship, nationality, or immigration status on the decennial census. Norton emphasized that the American Community Survey, which is regularly given to a rotating sampling of households, already asks questions about citizenship status. In permitting an untested question on citizenship status, the Census Bureau risks reducing response rates and threatens to underemphasize minority communities.

On Thursday, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, on which Norton is a senior member, will conduct a hearing with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross testifying. The Census Bureau falls under the Department of Commerce. The hearing will focus, in part, on whether Ross mislead Congress when he previously testified before the Committee regarding the source of the citizenship question and whether the Census Bureau is sufficiently prepared to conduct the 2020 Census. According to Ross, the citizenship question was at the request of the Department of Justice, allegedly to assist in enforcing civil rights laws. New evidence, however, shows that Ross was misleading in these statements, and that he himself requested this unnecessary question. Two courts have already said the Department of Commerce violated the law – and one said it violated the Constitution itself – by requesting the citizenship question.

"It is clear that allowing a citizenship status question on the census will do nothing to help enforce civil rights laws, as we have had enforcement without such information for decades," Norton said. "On the contrary, a citizenship question will undermine civil rights by driving down responses, especially from minority communities. Since the all-important questions of congressional apportionment and federal funding rely on an accurate census, we must do everything we can to ensure this unnecessary and harmful question is not allowed to drive down response rates to the 2020 Census."