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John — Only hours into his presidency, Trump undid President Biden’s order that affirmed how everyone in the country should be counted in the U.S. Census. And NPR says that Trump’s move “clear[s] a path for reshaping election maps” by undercounting communities of color. Let’s be clear: This is a gift to the extremist, anti-democracy groups behind Project 2025, who are that much closer to distorting the U.S. Census for political ends. They aim to add a citizenship question to the decennial census questionnaire, which they tried in 2020 until they were blocked by the fair maps movement. Trump is back and emboldened, but here is the good news: We were prepared for these attacks. And we’re ready to fight back. We’ve done it before and won, and we have a strategy to beat Trump’s extremism and defend our democracy again. Trump’s action on the census could lead to a blatant attempt to undercount communities with higher populations of immigrants and undocumented people. The impacts would be far-reaching: The decennial census is the basis of our electoral maps, meaning that representation could be more heavily weighted to certain communities. Federal funding to states for programs like Medicaid and Medicare are also determined on the basis of census population counts, meaning communities with non-citizen residents could get less federal aid than they deserve if we don’t get an accurate count. On top of Trump’s executive order, last week, Republican state attorneys general sued to try to stop the 2030 Census from counting all U.S. residents. The federal judge presiding over this case, David Joseph, is a Trump appointee with a track record for upholding gerrymandered maps. Thank you so much for stepping up in this critical moment for our democracy. The NDRC Team
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