One of the only fortunate things about Team Trump is that they are, thank goodness, reliably dumb. The Trump administration has been unsubtle in pushing for a new question to be added to the 2020 census asking each person whether they are a citizen; this question is not currently asked because it has been widely understood that non-citizens would be fearful of answering. Would their answer be reported to other authorities? Would simply answering a census question result in deportation?
Asking the question is therefore an excellent way to ensure that undocumented immigrants (and, for that matter, many documented ones) hide themselves from the census. Since an official census of residents is how both congressional representation and some federal funding is apportioned, this has the net desired effect of undercounting cities with high numbers of immigrants, shrinking their representation. The not-so-innocent question is meant to punish immigrants as well as the places immigrants live.
But is the push to include it intended to be a political ploy by Team Trump? The only way to determine that would be if they openly couched it as political ploy, and—Oh, will you look at that.
The Commerce Department, which oversees the census, has until March 31 to decide whether to approve the question, but President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign has just come out strongly in favor—and it’s already using the issue to raise money and score political points.
“In another era, this would be COMMON SENSE,” the campaign said in an email on Monday, “but 19 attorneys general said they will fight the President if he dares to ask people if they are citizens.”
Fundraising off a demand to require a citizenship question on the census would seem a fairly open assertion that the effort is a politically-motivated one, rather than a coincidental one. So there you go.