The Trump administration has been accused of 'unprecedented' interference in the 2020 US census, allegedly aiming to exclude undocumented migrants from the count to reduce the number of congressional seats allocated to Democrat-leaning states. A memo written by Census Bureau Deputy Director Ron Jarmin in September 2020, recently released, claims former President Donald Trump and his officials were developing a method to identify unauthorised residents and remove them from the final population figures.
According to the memo, Trump issued a presidential memorandum in July 2020 ordering the Census Bureau to tally the number of unauthorised immigrants in each state and subtract them from the House reapportionment population estimates. Jarmin believed this would benefit the Republican Party by limiting the representation of states with large immigrant populations, which tend to vote Democrat.
The US census, conducted every decade, determines the distribution of House seats and Electoral College votes. Jarmin's memo complained that the Commerce Department was showing an 'unusually high degree of engagement' in technical matters, which he described as 'unprecedented' compared to previous censuses. He also raised concerns about breaches of privacy for census respondents.
The memo, addressed to then-Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, outlined Jarmin's view that the Census Bureau should remain an independent statistical agency. Critics have accused the Trump administration of attempting to gerrymander districts by manipulating census data, a practice that can rig elections in favour of one party.
