New Email Raises Concern About Trump Commitment To Census Confidentiality
The Justice Department declined to take a firm stance on whether the Census Bureau could be required to disclose confidential individual responses, newly disclosed emails show, raising alarm among advocacy groups already deeply concerned about the Trump administration’s motivation for adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
Civil rights, immigrant and other advocacy groups are fighting the addition of the question to the census. They say immigrants and other groups won’t respond to the decennial survey for fear of revealing their immigration status to the Trump administration.
The Census Bureau has sought to assuage those concerns in part by noting that federal law strictly and clearly prohibits the bureau from sharing individual information it collects. The bureau only publishes aggregated information, and the law requires that it only be used for statistical purposes.
But in a recently disclosed June email, a top aide to John Gore, then the acting head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, advised him to give an ambiguous answer to a legal question from a member of Congress about protecting census data.
In 2010, the Justice Department’s Office Of Legal Counsel, or OLC, authored a memo saying that the Patriot Act did not compel the secretary of commerce to give law enforcement access to census answers that would otherwise be kept confidential. Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) asked Gore if the DOJ still agreed with that opinion and whether any federal law could require the Census Bureau to turn over confidential census data to law enforcement.
J. Benjamin Aguiñaga, then Gore’s chief of staff, advised Gore to answer the question vaguely.
“I don’t think we want to say too much there, in case the issues addressed in the OLC opinion or related issues come up later for renewed debate,” Aguiñaga wrote. “So I’ve just said that the Department will abide by all laws requiring confidentiality.”
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