July 21, 2020

By Brian Gabriel
gabriel@redistrictingfoundation.org

National Redistricting Foundation’s Statement on Trump’s Memorandum to Exclude Undocumented Residents from the Decennial Apportionment and Redistricting Process

Washington, D.C. — Today, the Trump administration issued a blatantly racist and unconstitutional memorandum expressing the president’s desire and intention to exclude undocumented residents from the decennial apportionment and redistricting process. In response, Marina Jenkins, Litigation & Policy Director for the National Redistricting Foundation, released the following statement: 

Our country and our Constitution are founded on principles of equal representation. Over 150 years ago, the Fourteenth Amendment transformed this nation by requiring an “actual Enumeration” every ten years of “the whole number of persons in each State,” thereby abandoning the abhorrent practice of counting enslaved persons as three-fifths. As the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Evenwel v. Abbott just four years ago, counting everyone–and counting everyone equally–is the “theory of the Constitution.”

The President would apparently like this not to be so. But Trump cannot unilaterally change the U.S. Constitution. 

This is not the first time the Trump administration has tried to weaponize the census to harm communities of color, and it may not be the last. But the National Redistricting Foundation remains committed to fighting for fairness every step of the way. 

After the administration announced its intention to add a citizenship question to the decennial questionnaire, we challenged that unlawful action through Kravitz v. Department of Commerce. And it was the NRF-supported lawsuit Common Cause v. Lewis, a partisan gerrymandering case in North Carolina, that revealed the true motivation behind adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. Discovery in Common Cause v. Lewis unearthed a memo written by the chief architect of Republican gerrymandering, Dr. Thomas Hofeller, which argued that adding a citizenship question to be used in redistricting would be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”

Ultimately, the Supreme Court blocked the citizenship question because the administration’s rationale–that citizenship data would be needed to better enforce the Voting Right Act–was disingenuous. Today’s memorandum confirms that fact even more. The Trump administration’s attempts to manipulate the 2020 Census are, and have always been, about suppressing the political power of black and brown communities. 

We will not stand by as the Trump administration tries, once again, to intimidate immigrant communities and communities of color for political gain.

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