In the new rollback of Trump administration census-related policies that opponents feared will be used to benefit Republicans and whites during the drawing of state and local boundaries, the U.S. Census Bureau is halting attempts to create neighborhood-level figures on citizenship and age of people, using 2020 census results.
As part of a 2020 census order signed by President Joe Biden on Wednesday, the Census Bureau said on Friday that it would discontinue plans to establish city-block citizenship tabulations using 2020 census data combined with administrative documents.
Mr. Biden's order reversed two Trump orders connected to the 2020 census, among his first actions as President. The first sought to discern by government documents the citizenship status of a U.S. resident, and the second attempted to illegally exclude individuals in the U.S. from the numbers used to assign representative seats among the states.
Mr. Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, had ordered the production of the block-level citizenship data in 2018.
After Wednesday’s order by Mr. Biden, the Census Bureau said none of the data from the 2020 census would include information on citizenship or immigration status, at any geographic level.
Citizen Voting Age by Race and Ethnicity (CVAP) data were created almost two decades ago to help assess whether minority communities were getting equal opportunities to elect candidates of their choice. The data currently comes from American Community Survey estimates.