The Department of Homeland Security has agreed to share certain government records from its databases to help the Census Bureau produce data about the U.S. citizenship status of every person living in the country.
DHS quietly announced the data-sharing agreement in a regulatory document posted on its website on Dec. 27. It marks the latest development in the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to carry out the executive order President Trump issued in July after courts blocked the administration from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
Two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year to keep the citizenship question off, President Trump said in the executive order that releasing citizenship data based on existing records would allow states to redraw voting districts using the number of eligible voters rather than all residents in an area — a method of redistricting that a prominent GOP strategist concluded would politically benefit Republicans and non-Hispanic white people.
According to the DHS document, which was first reported by Federal Computer Week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is sharing personal information about naturalized U.S. citizens and green card holders from records going back to as early as 1973.
More recent records dating to 2013 from Customs and Border Protection, as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will provide the Census Bureau with data such as noncitizens’ full names, birth dates, addresses, Social Security numbers and alien registration numbers. CBP is also sharing the travel histories of visitors to the U.S., including those who have overstayed their visas.
Federal law restricts the release of immigration records about survivors of human trafficking and of certain other crimes who have applied for special visas, as well as survivors of domestic abuse who have applied for immigration benefits under the Violence Against Women Act. Still, USCIS has asked for permission to release to the Census Bureau data about refugees and asylum-seekers, whose records generally cannot be shared without their consent or a waiver signed by the Homeland Security secretary.
The bureau plans to use the data it does receive to try to match the DHS records with those from other agencies about the same person. Each individual’s records would then be used in a statistical model designed to produce anonymized estimates of U.S. citizens and noncitizens living in the country.
It is unclear, however, whether this process will be able to accurately determine the citizenship status of individuals. “No one source of citizenship information is complete and up-to-date,” the DHS document — known as a privacy impact assessment — warns, while noting that misidentified individuals would receive “no adverse impact” because the efforts are only for “statistical purposes.”
Still, Latinx community groups represented by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Asian Americans Advancing Justice – AAJC are currently suing the administration, arguing that its data efforts are part of a conspiracy to stop Latinx communities, noncitizens and other immigrants from receiving fair political representation.
Meanwhile, the administration has spent months trying to amass citizenship records from other federal agencies, including the State Department and the Social Security Administration, plus states. In November, Nebraska became the first state to agree to share its driver’s license records with the Census Bureau.
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