Defending the Trump administrationās controversial decision to add a question about US citizenship to the 2020 census form, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters on Tuesday, āItās something that has been included in every census since 1965, with the exception of 2010, when it was removed.ā
Thatās wrong. The citizenship question was removed from the decennial census form in 1950 and hasnāt been used since. It is asked on the annual American Community Survey, which reaches about 15 percent of US households, but Sanders didn’t give any indication that she was referring to that survey. And the question wasn’t removed from that survey in 2010.
Sanders says a citizenship question has been on every census since 1965.
Citizenship hasnāt been questioned on a decennial census since 1950: https://t.co/xwx10yrUeH pic.twitter.com/siAIF8lCIk
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) March 27, 2018
She also said the question was “necessary for the Department of Justice to protect voters, specifically to help us better comply with the Voting Rights Act.ā
But Vanita Gupta, who led the Justice Departmentās Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama and is now president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, told me recently, āVoting rights enforcement has never depended on having that question on the [census] form since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act. Thatās plainly a ruse to collect that data and ultimately to sabotage the census.ā