Inside, I can speak to the residents through their doors and patiently assure them that anything they tell me is confidential. But if someone walks in or out of the building, I can legally hold the door and let myself into the foyer. The front door is locked and though I see silhouettes in the windows, no one is answering their doorbells.
Illstarred census gets thumbsup free#
Unlike Phase 1, when a brisk pace was expected, we are free to take the time necessary to get a response. We are in “Phase 2” of the decennial census’s “Nonresponse Followup.” Most enumerators, who spent the past two months visiting every address that did not mail in a census questionnaire, have been let go, leaving behind what I adamantly call an “elite squad” - high-performing employees tasked with revisiting addresses where others failed to obtain information. A man in coveralls walks toward the door.
My shoulder bag is spun around to hide the giant U.S. On a sunny afternoon in June 2010, I sit on a stoop in Bushwick, an east Brooklyn neighborhood with a large immigrant population, watching the front door of the apartment building across the street. The message triggered a memory from the later stages of census enumeration in 2010 - stages that are getting woefully cut short due to this week’s Supreme Court ruling. Please work diligently and continue to enumerate as many people as possible.” Census smartphone: “As of 11:00 pm local time on October 15, data collection for the operation will be complete. I am painfully aware of how much will be lost by the Supreme Court’s decision to let the Trump administration cut short the counting process.Īt 2:43 am on October 14, after two months of going door-to-door as a census enumerator, I received a message on my official U.S. Having worked as an enumerator for the Census Bureau in both 20, I understand just how difficult it is to make sure everyone is fairly counted - especially during a pandemic. Lost Opportunities for Adequate Counting and Fair Reapportionment As this census happens to fall on an election year, Trump will only be able to oversee congressional reapportionment - and attempt to unconstitutionally exclude undocumented immigrants - if the pandemic-delayed Census Bureau finishes processing the collected data on schedule. The results of the decennial census, one of the U.S.’s oldest and most painstakingly thorough institutions, determine the number of representatives in the House and electors in the Electoral College apportioned to each state. There is little mystery behind the administration’s motivations. Testifying before Congress that same day, Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham (a Trump appointee) dodged questions about how the agency was planning to complete three months of work in two months’ time.
Illstarred census gets thumbsup full#
Then, on July 29, 2020, under orders from the White House, the Census Bureau cut a full month from the three months scheduled for the door-to-door follow-up. One of the Trump administration’s first assaults on the census was its 2019 attempt to add a citizenship question to the census questionnaire, which, while unsuccessful, engendered mistrust of the census among undocumented immigrants. Census data is used to allocate roughly $1.5 trillion in federal income tax to local services, such as education, health care and infrastructure and to determine local and state voting districts for the coming decade. The Justice Department’s emergency request to the Supreme Court was the latest act in a long campaign by the Trump administration to hinder census operations and deny marginalized communities the resources and political power that accurate census data can provide. Census Bureau announced that all operations, including door-to-door interviews, would cease on October 15 - 16 days earlier than previously scheduled. The Supreme Court effectively approved the Trump administration’s request to cut the 2020 census short in a ruling issued Tuesday in response to an emergency request made last week by the Justice Department.
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