Former top Commerce aide says he was directed by Ross to add census citizenship question

6/25/19
A House panel is releasing information that it says “points to a partisan and discriminatory effort” behind the Trump administration’s move to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 Census, just days before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the matter. In a memo to members of the House Oversight Committee, the panel’s Democratic staff said that James Uthmeier, a former senior adviser and counsel to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, had refused to answer “dozens of questions” but that he had nonetheless “confirmed key information” about the effort to add the citizenship question. “Mr. Uthmeier disclosed that Secretary Ross directed him to begin examining the citizenship question within weeks of being sworn in as Secretary and that they had multiple conversations about it well before any request came from DOJ — erasing any doubt about the inaccuracy of Secretary Ross’ claim that he added the citizenship question ‘solely’ at DOJ’s request,” the memo reads. Ross originally told Congress that his decision to add the question came solely in response to a December 2017 Justice Department request, but lawsuits later produced emails showing that Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, had been pushing for the question for months before that.

In a statement issued Tuesday morning, the panel’s chairman, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), said the Trump administration “claimed that the only reason it wanted to add the citizenship question was to help the Department of Justice enforce the Voting Rights Act, but that claim has now been exposed as a pretext.” “Official after official appearing before the Committee have refused to answer questions about the real reasons behind their effort, but the mounting evidence points to a partisan and discriminatory effort to harm the interests of Democrats and non-Whites,” he said.

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