President Donald Trump’s “executive action to exclude undocumented people from the census holds terrible echoes of erasure and exclusion,” from the country’s past, according to Democrats Stacey Abrams and Rep. Karen Bass of California.
In an opinion piece for The Washington Post published on Monday, Bass and Abrams wrote that Trump’s “memo is clearly a repeat of his previous efforts to stoke fear of immigrants, refugees and communities of color and to distort the true picture of America.”
They note that “Along with this fear tactic, the Trump administration is stealthily trying to end the 2020 Census early, without accurately counting Black, Latino or Native American communities, whose response rates currently trail the national average. Asian and Pacific Islander communities are also at risk of being undercounted. Worse, the Trump administration wants to use the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to use a flawed statistical tool that will cement the erasure of these populations.”
Bass and Abrams go on to write that “the consequences of that erasure will be dire. Every 10 years, the census count is used to allocate federal funds and to reallocate political power through reapportionment and redistricting. At stake is the annual distribution of $1.5 trillion for everything from schools to health care to the roads and bridges we drive on.”
They conclude, “at this demographic and ideological inflection point, we must commit to the virtue of seeing our people as they are, who they are and where they live, so that we can continue to grapple with the policy implications with purpose, fairness and facts. To do anything less would be committing malfeasance against democracy itself.”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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