The combined efforts of all U.S. Government agencies are able to create a sophisticated database that provides the Trump Administration with information on the number of immigrants without U.S. citizenship.
The evolution of new technologies permits tracking accurately people who leave data “openly” in online registers of public portals or those that can be used by the government. This way, non-citizens can be quantified and located easily, including their place of origin.
This new option was used by Donald Trump´s government, which made efforts to place a question about citizenship in the 2020 census, however, with obstacles like the unfavorable opinion of the Supreme Court of Justice, the government found an alternative route that may legally give it access to “more accurate” data.
Faced with this reformulation of the strategy to find data on undocumented immigrants, President Donald Trump’s decision to refuse to include the citizenship question in the census was “easy” and he asked his government to examine its files to find out how many people living in the country, are immigrants without U.S. citizenship.
“We are pursuing a new option,” Trump told reporters from the White House Rose Garden.
Without delay, the Head of State signed an executive order instructing all agencies of his government to provide any information they may have on the number of U.S. citizens and non-citizens to the U.S. Department of Commerce, to which the Census Bureau reports.
“We will utilize (data from different agencies) to gain a full, complete and accurate count of the non-citizen population (…) It will be, we think, far more accurate” than including the question in the census, he added.
Trump thus dismissed his efforts to add the question to the census; two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court had decided that the Government had not given an adequate reason for including that question in the census.
As usual, Donald Trump offered a fight in the face of adversity and initially refused to accept the Supreme Court’s decision and asked his lawyers to explore options for including it, but the Census Bureau had already begun printing forms without that question. The litigation would have complicated the development of the national questionnaire, Trump acknowledged.
“We can use the information (from government agencies) along with information collected through the questionnaire to create the official census,” Pointed out Trump from the White House.
The work of its agencies will “generate an accurate account of how many citizens, non-citizens, and illegal aliens” are in the country and that will serve “to make responsible decisions” in many areas, including “immigration,” he said.
The president recurrently blamed the Democrats, whom he accused of wanting to “conceal the numbers” of undocumented immigrants in the country by opposing the inclusion of a citizenship question in the census, and promised not “to back down on our efforts” to precise the citizenship status in the country.
Translated by: José Espinoza