Newly Revealed Email Suggests Top Trump Appointee Lied to Congress About Scheme to Target Non-Citizens

This keeps happening for Trump’s appointees.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross Credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call file photo

When President Donald Trump’s administration announced it would add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census, many observers argued that this appeared to be a cynical ploy to intimidate immigrants and thus under-count the population of regions with high levels of immigration.

The administration, most notably Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross in testimony to Congress, has fired back at these critiques, saying that the citizenship question arose because of legitimate concerns raised by the Justice Department. However, new emails suggest that this was a flat-out lie.

“Department of Justice, as you know, initiated the request for inclusion of the citizenship question,” Ross told the House Ways and Means Committee on March 22, 2018. “Because it is from the Department of Justice, we are taking it very seriously, and we will issue a fulsome documentation of whatever conclusion we finally come to.”

View the complete September 17 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet.org website here.