Trump and the Republican party wanted to undercount BIPOC in the 2020 census. They’re continuing to do everything in their power to erase underrepresented communities; how else will they stay in power? They keep millions from communities in need and gerrymander districts in their favor. Classic GOP racist play. Classic.
A new report from the U.S. Census Bureau released Thursday shows that Latinos were left out of the 2020 census at more than three times the rate of a decade earlier, and the count for Native Americans living on reservations and Black people was static from the 2010 rates. Now, that doesn’t sound right at all.
According to NPR, those who identified as white and not Latino were overcounted at almost double the rate of 2010, Asian Americans were also overcounted, and the 2020 tally count for Pacific Islanders remains unclear.
Oddly enough, the Bureau insists the census remains “fit to use" for reallocating each state's share of congressional seats and Electoral College votes, as well as redrawing voting districts.
As Daily Kos staff writer Aysha Qamar wrote in November of last year, the Urban Institute estimated that, nationwide, the net undercount rates by race or ethnicity were highest for Black people, followed by Latino people and Pacific Islanders, and the count could be the largest miscount of the true U.S. population in 30 years.
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Make no mistake, the undercount of BIPOC is absolutely intentional. It effectively rips away the possibility of distribution of an estimated $1.5 trillion each year in federal money to communities for health care, education, transportation, and other public services—not to mention the political power of redistricting.
As Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro so succinctly tweeted:
“This was intentional. After Trump tried to use the Census to enforce his racism and xenophobia, Latinos were undercounted at 3X the 2010 rate. The undercount will strip Latino communities of government funding and electoral power. Congress must not allow this to happen again.”
Arturo Vargas, chief executive of NALEO Educational Fund, told The Washington Post undercounting by the census was not surprising as the Trump administration’s efforts to silence and erase those communities of color continue.
“There was a definite undercount of immigrant cities, and I will argue that that was one of the goals of the Trump administration—to make immigrants invisible or nonexistent, and by not counting them, that was one way to do that,” he said.
Trump’s attack on the census count of BIPOC goes back to 2019 when he began campaigning to include a controversial citizenship question on the 2020 census, which asked, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?”
The question signals alarms that undocumented immigrants would not participate in the census should such a question be included. The Supreme Court later ruled against including the question on census forms.
As soon as the census was released in April of 2020, lawsuits came pouring in.
As The Wall Street Journal reported, top Democratic lawyer Marc Elias filed lawsuits in three states—Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota—with divided government control, ahead of what would undoubtedly be a war between parties, only to be solved by state courts arriving to redraw congressional maps. Elias promised that those were just the tip of the litigation iceberg.
The Bureau’s latest report only offers a national-level look at the count's accuracy; the agency has plans to release state-level metrics this summer.
