NORTHAMPTON — As the city welcomed 53 new citizens on Thursday, the topics of immigration and citizenship dominated national headlines.
Despite pledging on Tuesday to not include a question about citizenship on the 2020 census, on Wednesday the Justice Department — on orders from President Donald Trump — reversed course and said they were looking for a “new rationale” to include the question.
Critics have said the move is a deliberate attempt to intimidate undocumented immigrants so that they won’t fill out the census, leading to an undercount of those populations.
“Intimidation kills,” said Ari Dematos, 41, of Brazil. He was one of the immigrants who became citizens on Thursday in Northampton, and he said many of them understand the anxiety of being undocumented. “Now, we as Americans have the right to participate in our democracy,” he said.
Trump’s push to include the citizenship question comes amid outrage over his administration’s treatment of the immigrants and asylum seekers it is detaining at the southern border.
On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General released a report describing squalid and overcrowded conditions at migrant detention centers in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. And a recent ProPublica investigation detailed the Facebook activity of Border Patrol agents who joked about dead migrants and made threatening posts about Democratic members of Congress.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to push for the citizenship question on the census.
That question “would create an undercount of Latino or other communities of color in this country who don’t want to answer the question for fear that it would somehow call attention to them,” David Daley, a journalist who lives in Haydenville, told the Gazette Thursday. “And in this political environment regarding immigration, that’s an entirely understandable fear.”
Daley — an expert on gerrymandering and the author of the book “Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count” — has a unique connection to the story of the citizenship question.
Back in late May, the estranged daughter of the late Republican redistricting strategist Thomas Hofeller released some of her father’s documents that she had found on his hard drives.
Hofeller, as it turns out, was one of the key figures in the Trump administration’s decision to push for the inclusion of the citizenship question. One of Hofeller’s released files was a 2015 study he wrote on the citizenship question, concluding that its addition to the census would allow the GOP to draw even more gerrymandered maps in order to freeze Democrats out of power.
In a court deposition, Hofeller’s daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, said it was after reading an interview with Daley that she fully understood the importance of her father’s documents.
In a phone interview Thursday, Daley said that the census is important because political power and government dollars are allocated based on its population totals.
“So an undercount of Latino voters could shift hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding to white, more conservative states, and it could also affect the apportionment of congressional seats,” Daley said.
Daley also said that the Hofeller files made it clear that the GOP intended to “turbocharge” its gerrymandering of state legislatures after the census, in order to reduce the political power of Democrats and Latinos in particular. And state legislatures draw congressional districts in most places, he added.
In other words, a lot is riding on the 2020 census, Daley said — especially considering that the Supreme Court ruled last week that federal courts can’t judge questions of partisan gerrymandering. Daley called that decision a “five-alarm fire for fair representation.”
Even if the citizenship question is ultimately not added, the administration’s push for it could itself affect the count, said state Rep. Mindy Domb, D-Amherst.
“At this point, we have to look at what the result is,” Domb said after the naturalization ceremony in Northampton on Thursday.
Domb said that the mere possibility of the citizenship question is already making immigrants feel threatened, adding that she is worried those fears might lead to an inaccurate count, even if the question is ultimately not included.
With those concerns in mind, Domb said that she has been organizing community conversations about the census in order to be ready when the count begins next spring.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.