You can guarantee that whenever Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is involved in something, it’s evil, it’s attacking people of color, or it’s both. It shouldn’t be any surprise then, that newly-revealed documents now show that the “self-deportation” architect was among the “anti-immigration hard-liners” who lobbied Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to include the question of citizenship in order to reduce the representation of immigrants in the Census, and at the request of a certain white supremacist:
In a July 2017 email to Ross's chief of staff, Wendy Teramoto, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach says Steve Bannon — the former White House strategist — directed Kobach to speak on the phone with Ross in 2017 during the early months of the Trump administration about the then lack of a citizenship question on the census. Kobach had once helped lead Trump's now-dissolved voter fraud commission.
Ross ignored the advice of five former Census directors and included the question anyway, claiming it was needed for “more effective enforcement” of the Voting Rights Act. That’s hilarious, because Kobach’s mission in life, aside from kicking immigrants out, has been to make people of color who are eligible to vote ineligible to vote. Another document, obtained following a lawsuit from 18 attorneys general, showed a Census researcher was concerned that the additional question would cost the agency nearly $30 million. Ross also ignored his advice.
The Commerce Department added in a statement that “the notion that Secretary Ross decided to reinstate the citizenship question in response to a single email” is disproved by the fact that Mr. Kobach’s note is but one of the more than 500 pages of records produced.
Yet Kobach—recently held in contempt of court for violating a judge’s order—won out against career Census officials anyway. “These documents make clear what we already knew,” said Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights’ Vanita Gupta. “Career staff at the Census Bureau warned the political leadership at the Commerce Department that the inclusion of a citizenship question would depress census response rates, increase costs and diminish the quality of census data.”