“Trump Lost the Citizenship Question Fight in Court. Now the Real Fight Begins.”

A New Washington Post Op-Ed by ICAP’s Joshua Geltzer & Mary McCord

While the fight in court over the citizenship question and the 2020 Census now— finally — appears to have concluded, there’s another fight looming. ICAP’s Joshua Geltzer and Mary McCord explain in a new Washington Post op-ed:

Trump’s continued intimation that he intends to use the census to ferret out those unlawfully present spreads precisely the fear he hopes will depress participation.

Indeed, even the apparent protections included in the executive order Trump issued Thursday directing pursuit of citizenship information through other means — protections that include an acknowledgment of federal law barring the use of census-gathered data to bring immigration enforcement actions against particular individuals — may be lost on key audiences in vulnerable communities. The dry language of an executive order whose text will be read by very few Americans seems almost sure to be drowned out by the far louder rhetoric of the president himself — rhetoric that’s designed not to reassure but, to the contrary, to intimidate.

Read the full piece here.