Black and Brown NYers at Risk from Project 2025 in Coming Census

 https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2025/08/07/will-project-2025-taget-us-through-the-census/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Newsletter%208/13/24%20(Morning)&utm_source=ActiveCampaign

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by Ariama C. LongAugust 7, 2025

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AmNews Illustration

 

The 2020 Census Operational Plan compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, part of the Department of Commerce. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)

President Trump’s administration has already started chipping away at the 2030 Census, using Project 2025, the playbook of far-right and racist policies that aims to overhaul the country and reshape governmental infrastructure. However, Black political leaders want to get ahead of it before people in New York State — particularly its Black and Brown population — are left disenfranchised and endangered.

The Census, taken every 10 years, plays a critical role in determining state representation in Congress and allocation of funding for local communities. New York lost one congressional seat in 2020 by only 89 people, largely due to the rush to get people counted during the COVID-19 crisis.

“We have to coordinate a statewide effort before the Census gets here,” said Assemblymember Michaelle C. Solages, who sponsored Assembly Bill A5864, which establishes a New York State office and commission for a local Census count. “We were caught flat-footed in 2020. Allocation for funding to health care, education, food, and assistance may be cut, but with an accurate Census count, we can stem the bleeding.”

The count is used to determine the number of congressional seats each state has — a process called apportionment — and electoral districts are redrawn based on where populations have increased or decreased. The government then gives or takes away hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding for communities based on that information. The U.S Census Bureau is currently in the research and testing phase of planning for 2030.

 

Census advocate partakes in bike ride to encourage Brooklynites to fill out Census form in September 2020. (Photo Credit: Ariama C. Long.)

Assemblymember Landon Dais. Contributed by Dais’s office.

“I’m ringing the bell. The Census is the end game,” said Assemblymember Landon Dais, who has been passionately championing state Census legislation. “If Democrats don’t wake up now, if we mess this up, it’s likely we won’t have another Democratic president or Senate for at least a generation. I need Governor Hochul to understand that this is a priority.”

Eliminating public input

The Trump administration moved in March 2025 to eliminate the Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on race and ethnicity, as well as the Census Scientific Advisory Committee, both of which give the bureau public input.

Meeta Anand, senior director of census & data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said the advisory committees provide input from people on the ground in their particular communities. The bureau specifically sought experts and community leaders from Black, Latino, Asian, Native American, rural, and other historically undercounted and underrepresented communities that don’t get the proper funding or representation in government they need.

“These people are able to ask questions in a way where they are prodding and probing what the bureau is doing,” said Anand. “The other part of it is because it was public input, questions asked of the bureau in these meetings, and recommendations made at these meetings, the Census Bureau was required to respond to them.”

Anand said the Trump administration claimed that these advisory committees were “biased,” which is why they are pushing to focus on outreach to “conservative groups” — populations that could win Republicans more votes.

In addition to deleting public input from communities of color, Anand said the administration is closing field test offices and defunding the count. The Census Bureau falls under both the Senate and the House, and the Census count is funded through the Senate and House Appropriations process. For Fiscal Year 2026 (FY 2026), the appropriations bill offers less funding at about $1.52 billion for the count than even Trump’s budget request.

The Census Project and other groups have been advocating for $2 billion a year to make needed investments in the count. “Which I know sounds like a lot but if you look at other lines in the budget, it’s actually not that huge. It’s been coming in at much lower for the last few years,” said Anand.

Without adequate funding for thorough testing and field sites before the decennial year, the

bureau will have a hard time improving accuracy since there are no do-overs, said Anand. For example, from 2012 to 2017, insufficient funding forced the cancellation of key tests in rural areas and on tribal lands. As a result, the 2020 Census saw undercounts in those areas.

Race and ethnicity data

The race and ethnicity data collection at the federal level currently includes a distinct “Middle Eastern or North African” (MENA) category. Project 2025’s plans essentially call for reversing vital updates to this type of data collection, known as the Statistical Policy Directive 15, in an effort to control standards long sought by the civil rights community.

The MENA region covers an expansive area, from Africa to the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan in Central Asia to the Mediterranean. It includes many Arabic and Islamic countries like Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the West Bank and Gaza. The 2020 Census was the first census to specifically solicit MENA responses. Its count concluded that California, Michigan, and New York now have the largest MENA populations.

Similarly, the Census has struggled with accurate Latino racial and ethnic distinctions in the past, but reported a huge increase in population numbers in the last count.

Census advocate partakes in bike ride to encourage Brooklynites to fill out Census form in September 2020. (Photo Credit: Ariama C. Long.)

This complexity about race, ethnicity, nationality, and color has been a long-standing issue with communities in the Black and Latino diaspora. Nancy López, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico (UNM) and director of UNM’s Institute for the Study of Race & Social Justice, pointed out the heated debate over the question of “Hispanic origin.” It’s hard for the Census to quantify some people because “race is a master social status (like gender) that is often ascribed based on someone’s skin color and other differences in physical appearance, like facial features and hair texture,” she said.

For example, Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran K. Mamdani identified as Asian (South Asian) and Black (Ugandan) on his college application because the category of race often lacks nuance in the U.S.

However, Census records have also been instrumental in preserving historical data, helping many Black Americans trace their ancestry and uncover their family’s journey out of chattel slavery to citizenship in the U.S from 1790 to 1860. Free Black Americans and “free nonwhites” were also counted at that time as Black (B) or Mulatto (M) in the Census, according to the National Archives and Records Administration. The first Census after the Civil War was in 1870. It is the first to include Black people and former slaves by name.

Immigration

Jeff Wice, a professor at the New York Law School, said Census funding is being “attacked,” with Republicans trying to restrict the use of apportionment funds to be “based solely on citizens.”

According to the most recent state comptroller report, New York State benefitted from the international migration of more than 519,000 people between 2020 and 2024. This offset much steeper losses of more than 966,000 people leaving the state during COVID.

Immigration, in particular, has been important for sustaining the labor force across the state. Foreign-born New Yorkers are enrolled in higher education at twice the rate of native-born, and are in the labor force and employed at higher rates, said the report.

“There’s about half a million or more undocumented persons or noncitizens living in New York State. These are people who are our neighbors, pay taxes, they serve in the military, and they’ve been counted in the Census since 1790,” said Wice. “But now, the Trump administration wants to exclude these people [so they can] allocate congressional power.”

Project 2025 calls for another attempt at adding a citizenship question to the 2030 Census.

Wice said the citizenship question threatens accuracy and undermines the goal of the Census to provide fair representation based on the total number of people living in the country during the redistricting process, which violates the 14th Amendment. This question could “scare away” immigrants or undocumented people from taking the survey, or possibly use confidential information for U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) action, said Wice.

“What they’re trying to do essentially is to roll back the gains made after the Civil War, when the 14th Amendment was enacted. Lawmakers then made it very explicit that the basis for congressional apportionment is to be [an] account of all people,” said Wice.

Anand added that, “In this atmosphere of public distrust in why the government is collecting or sharing data is that once you start asking a citizenship question, people start getting spooked and wonder why you’re asking the question.”

A citizenship question inevitably leads to a decline in response rates, not only in undercounted immigrant and undocumented communities, but also in mixed-status families and with people who generally distrust the government, said Anand.

“People need to focus more on the Census,” said Wice. “It’s one of the building blocks of our democracy and should be just as important as your morning coffee and breakfast cereal. [The] Census help shape everything — it helps shape the delivery of all government services. If you look outside your window, your streets, your hospitals, your schools, your senior centers, your parks — everything the government does is driven by the Census in one way or another.”