The 2020 Census is a major concern among civil rights issues, said Vanita Gupta, who was the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division during the Barack Obama administration.
The census is "one of the least sexy civil rights issues," but the Donald Trump administration’s citizenship question plan is “an issue that is of really grave concern," Gupta said on CBS News.
The census is "so foundational to our democracy," Gupta said.
"People don’t have trust that this administration is going to follow the law," although there are laws that protect against using census data for enforcement purposes, Gupta said in the CBS News interview.
Gupta disputed a claim from White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders that the citizenship question had been on every census since 1965 except 2010. “The last time it was on the short form of the census was in the pre-civil rights era, where there was continuously a systematic undercount of communities of color,” Gupta said in the interview.
The long-form census does have a citizenship question, Gupta noted.
Documents that are part of ongoing litigation have revealed that former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, as well as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Kris Kobach, the former chairman of the disbanded Commission on Election Integrity, favored the idea of the citizenship question.
On July 26, a federal judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit that challenged the Trump administration’s decision to add the citizenship question.
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