Census to Count All Persons Living In US, Says Biden

New US President Joe Biden has signed an executive order preventing the exclusion of undocumented immigrants from Census Bureau data.

In 2019, the US Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration's attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 US Census, which the Insights Association argued would deter responses from immigrants and could result in minorities being undercounted. Critics of the addition of the question said that should this undercount occur, it could allow for electorate boundaries being redrawn and result in billions of dollars of funding being withheld from vulnerable communities across the US. Trump argued in return that 'Only in America' could a government be barred from asking participants in its national Census whether or not they were citizens.

Earlier this week, Bureau Director Steven Dillingham, who was President Trump's candidate for the top Bureau post, announced his retirement. On announcing the news, Dillingham also strongly refuted claims that he had contributed to pressure on statisticians to rush through a report on the number of people in the country illegally.

Separately, federal law requires the Census Bureau to report data for apportionment by December 31st, but last April the Bureau had to suspend its in-person data collection efforts for several months due to Covid-19, and it therefore asked for an extension to October 31st for data collection and a corresponding four-month extension to the reporting deadline. However, in October, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration could end the census count early, despite warnings from four former Census Bureau directors that this could mean hard-to-count communities being missed, and less accurate data being produced. Earlier this week, Susan Rice, Biden's domestic policy adviser, said that President Biden will ensure that the Census Bureau now has time to complete an accurate population count for each state.

Web site: www.census.gov .