Jeff Sessions told DOJ not to discuss alternatives to citizenship: NPR

The Trump administration rejects six prosecutions in the country on a citizenship issue that was added to the 2020 census, insist the authorities, for one of the main purposes: to get better data on the identity of the US citizen in the country.

Last December, the Department of Justice sent a letter to the Census Bureau asking it to include the highly controversial issue in the forms for the next national enumeration. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, who oversees the census, finally responded in March by approving plans to add the question.

But a few days after the Census Bureau had received a request from the Department of Justice, its staff had concluded that the collection of self-reported information by the census would not be the best way to generate better data on the citizenship. The office found that compiling existing government records on citizens' citizen status would not only produce more accurate information, but would also cost less.

To top it off, a Census Bureau study suggests that asking questions about citizen status in the current political climate could discourage non-citizens, including immigrants living illegally in the United States, to be part of the constitutionally enumerated census of every person living in the United States. This would undermine the accuracy of census information used to distribute Congressional seats, electoral college votes, and estimated federal funding of $ 800 billion a year from the states.

The acting director of the office, Ron Jarmin, attempted to arrange a meeting with representatives from the Department of Justice to discuss the office's preferred method for collecting information on citizenship and better understand how the GM wanted to use this data.

This discussion never took place, however, and the head of the Justice Department – US Attorney General Jeff Sessions – has ensured this, according to the testimony of a Justice Department official behind the question of citizenship.

In a case recently released for the first citizenship lawsuit, plaintiffs' lawyers wrote that John Gore testified outside the court that Sessions had personally made the decision to order the DOJ to not even not meet the Census Bureau. to discuss alternative approaches. "

The lawyers quote Gore's testimony to support their claims that the decision to add the citizenship issue was an abuse of the Secretary of Commerce's power over the census and aimed at discriminating against immigrant communities of color.

Kelly Laco, spokesperson for the Department of Justice, declined to comment.

Last week, at an event in Washington, DC by the Heritage Foundation, Sessions criticized a US court order allowing plaintiffs' lawyers to question Ross under oath as to why he had added the question of the citizenship. The Supreme Court temporarily suspended Ross's testimony.

"The words on the page have no motive, they are allowed or not," said Sessions during his speech.

He further noted, "Decision making is improved when decision-makers can have frank and open conversations."

Gore's testimony is the latest in a series of revelations extracted from court documents detailing how senior Trump administration officials have pushed to use the 2020 census to ask questions about citizenship status. . The Census Bureau has not interviewed every US household on this topic since 1950. Dozens of states, cities and other groups are suing to stop the Trump administration's plans to bring back an investigation of citizenship in the census.

In recent weeks, the administration's lawyers revealed that Ross was now remembering a spring 2017 conversation with Steve Bannon, then White House counselor, about the addition of a citizenship issue. In March, Ross told Congress that he was "unaware" of discussions about this with the White House. Bannon has connected Ross with Kris Kobach, former Vice President of the now-dissolved Election Fraud Commission of President Trump, who suggested wording of the issue to the Secretary of Commerce.

After Ross told lawmakers that the Department of Justice had "initiated" the request for a question and that it was "responding only", memos and e-mails issued in court proceedings clearly indicated that Ross and his staff had started working on the issue. the census shortly after he was confirmed commercial secretary in February 2017. In fact, Ross staff initially contacted the Ministry of Justice staff about this issue, and the MJ initially did not want to apply.

The Trump administration had tried unsuccessfully to protect Gore from the sworn interrogations of the plaintiffs' lawyers. He is Acting Deputy Attorney General who headed the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. The administration argues that the division needs answers to the new citizenship question to better enforce the law on the right to vote.

For decades, the federal government has relied on citizenship information to ensure that the voting power of racial and linguistic minorities is not diluted. Since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the Department of Justice has applied anti-discrimination law protections using estimates of the number of US citizens extracted from a Census Bureau survey, which is known now under the name American Community Survey. In the United States, about one in 38 households is required by law to complete this survey each year.

In its December 2017 letter to the Census Bureau, however, the Department of Justice stated that it would be "more appropriate" to collect citizenship data from each household at the census, once a decade, to enforce the law on the right to vote and redistribute constituencies.

Nevertheless, Gore does not seem certain that the data collected from the new question on citizenship would be more accurate.

According to the plaintiffs' complaint, Gore said Friday that he "does not even know if citizenship data based on answers to a citizenship question in the census will include more error margins or smaller, or will be more accurate than existing citizenship. " data currently supported by the Department of Justice. "

The former director of the Census Bureau, John Thompson, who serves as an expert witness to the plaintiffs in both New York-based summary proceedings, said he was concerned that the DOJ had not following the usual process of interviewing office staff after submitting their application. for a question of citizenship.

"The contribution of experts in the field is essential to formulating a new issue," wrote Thompson in a filing filed in court in September. "Without these discussions, there is a significant risk that the resulting citizenship data will not conform. [the Justice Department’s] Needs."

Thompson also detailed the uncertainty surrounding Ross's decision to have the Census Bureau compare the responses to the citizenship question of the 2020 Census with existing government records on citizenship. Quoting the testimony of Chief Scientist John Abowd, who has not been made public in its entirety, Thompson writes:

Abowd said the Census Bureau still did not know how the answers to the citizenship question would be combined with the administrative records to form a block-level citizenship data table. Citizenship data will be modified to prevent disclosure of the respondent's citizenship, if citizenship data produced after the decennial census of 2020 will have larger or smaller margins of error than the citizenship data currently used by the department of Justice, if the error margins associated with the data allow Justice's Department of Justice to effectively use the data, or even to know if the block-level data will be included in the data file of standard breakdown produced by the census. "

For the moment, the lawsuit for the New York lawsuits on the question of citizenship must begin on November 5th. This week, a US District Judge and the US Circuit's second appeal court dismissed the Trump administration's efforts to delay the proceedings. However, his lawyers may soon make a similar request to the Supreme Court.