The Trump administration may have abandoned its official efforts to insert a citizenship question into the 2020 U.S. census, but that doesn't mean the effects of those efforts aren't continuing. About a quarter of a million households are being asked that question, for every member of the household, as part of a "test" census form sent out to nearly half a million households.
It's not quite as hinky as it might at first seem. This is the test that was supposed to be done in order to gauge how the question would affect census responses, but that Trump administration officials wanted to ignore in their efforts to get the question on the 2020 census in time for census deadlines. The Census Bureau's experts believed that asking the question would result in fewer households returning the census at all, fearing that their answers would be used to target any noncitizen members of their families or simply as a reaction to the heightened suspicion that census probing was being used as a tool for law enforcement rather than for data collection. That would skew the census, perhaps heavily, in favor of white communities and white districts at the expense of those with more immigrants. This test will allow researchers to quantify that effect.
It is not without risks, however, Even though the form being sent out now is only a test version, it is still likely to raise the same suspicions—and it may not be clear to every household that it is, in fact, just a test. Recipients of the test version may be more suspicious of returning the real census forms later on, even if the same question no longer appears on them.
In the meantime, the Trump administration is continuing to be Official Assholes about the census efforts in general, and is evidently still devoted to using whatever citizenship data it can collect for a post-census reapportioning of federal power more heavily toward predominantly white communities. Rep. Ayanna Pressley asked Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham, during a Wednesday House Oversight subcommittee hearing, to clarify details of Donald Trump's executive order demanding that each federal agency assemble its existing citizenship data and send it on so that a government-wide data set could be crafted.
Specifically, she asked whether the data being collected would be specific enough that it could be used as the basis for Electoral College and House of Representatives reapportionment among states (of the sort that anti-immigration Republican strategists are demanding) and whether the Census Bureau, which he runs, would be handing the collected citizenship data over to assist states in doing their own post-census, citizen-filtered redistricting.
He couldn't answer those questions, which, as you can imagine, did not satisfy Pressley. "Let me get back to you on that," he promised. He's now been given 10 days to do so, so expect to hear more on this in nine days and 16 hours or so.
The Trump administration—or more accurately, the Republican Party as a whole—is still determined to do its damage on this one. It is taking every available avenue to boost its newly energized, white nationalism-infused agenda.