▶ 0:17:59The subcommittee will come to order. Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare a recess at any time. We welcome everyone to today's hearing on the accuracy of the census. I will now recognize myself for an opening statement. And before I begin, I no doubt believe there'll be some different conclusions and views on this from partisan perspective as there always are. But I do think there are some areas here where we can all agree that there ways to improve the census process.
▶ 0:18:23And I do hope we'll be able to have conversations along those lines where there can be some bipartisan agreement that there are things we might be able to do u better for uh future uh census um activities. So uh look, it is one of the Constitution's simplest commands. Article 1, section 2 states that an actual enumeration of the American people shall be conducted every 10 years. The dennial census of Americans, though it sounds mundane, is a core pillar of our democracy.
▶ 0:18:50It determines how many people represent each state in Congress, how many electoral votes each state gets in our presidential elections, informs the drawing of district lines for state and federal offices, and affects how much money each state receives from the federal government. Simply put, it's an it's important that the Census Bureau gets the count right. And in 2020, it seems that it failed. Indeed, the 2020 census should be called the sanctuary census. Just like sanctuary jurisdictions, the 2020 census unconstitutionally put illegal aliens ahead of American citizens.
▶ 0:19:21Under section two of the 14th amendment, known as the aortionment clause, the census must count, quote, "the whole number of persons in each state." At the time of the amendment's ratification, the term persons was understood to refer only to members of the American political community, citizens and permanent resident aliens who had been lawfully admitted to the country.
▶ 0:19:38Just as the Supreme Court has held that jurisdiction in the 14th Amendment means quote not merely subject in some respect or degree to the jurisdiction of the United States, but completely subject to their political jurisdiction and owing them direct and immediate allegiance end quote when determining who is a US citizen who is born to illegal alien parents. Indeed, the Supreme Court has recognized a similar principle, noting in 1992 that constitutional language governing the census contemplates more than mere physical presence and some element of allegiance or enduring tide to a place.
▶ 0:20:09It is unthinkable that the 14th Amendment's framers sought to reward states that harbored illegal aliens with additional congressional representation. Yet, that is exactly what happens now after the 2020 census. States with more illegal aliens, often because of a conscious policy choice to hamper federal law enforcement, and welcome immigration lawb breakakers, get more seats in Congress, more electoral votes and more of your federal tax dollars.
▶ 0:20:34A lot of them, in fact, the leading study found that if congressional seats were properly aortioned based on the number of citizens, Republican states would gain between 10 and 12 seats in the House of Representatives and votes in the electoral college. That's right. Illegal aliens and non-citizens have at least 10 seats in the US House of Representatives and the electoral college. And that was before Biden administration's policies welcomed 10 million more illegal aliens into our country during its disastrous four years.
▶ 0:21:02How many more seats will that give Democrats in the 2030 census if nothing changes? Counting of illegal aliens in the census and as part of the aortionment base also violates the core constitutional principle of one person, one vote. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that state and federal legislative districts must be roughly equal in population so that each citizen's vote is roughly equal in power. The 2020 census undermined this principle by counting illegal aliens in the aortionment base.
▶ 0:21:27Today, a voter in a congressional district with 730,000 citizens residents and 30,000 illegal aliens has a stronger say in the election of his representative than a voter in a congressional district with 760,000 citizens and no illegal immigrants. Shockingly though, the problems with the 2020 census did not stop there. Beyond the manifest unconstitutionality of including illegal aliens, the Census Bureau failed at its simplest task, accurately counting the legal population of the United States.
▶ 0:21:57The Census Bureau's own afteraction report found that it significantly undercounted the population of six states, five of which, including my home state of Texas, are predominantly Republican. In fact, in addition to Texas losing a seat, Florida lost out on two additional seats, Colorado gained a seat that it did not deserve, and Minnesota and Rhode Island each maintained a congressional seat that should have been lost. Conversely, the Census Bureau found that it overcounted in eight states, seven of which are predominantly Democratic.
▶ 0:22:25Estimates showed that these errors, which were unprecedented in the recent history of the census, cost Republicans six seats in the House. Six seats just from miscounting. And that's on top of the 10 to 12 extra seats Democrats have from counting illegal aliens. What's more, because the Census Bureau used a technique called differential privacy to scramble the data underlying the 2020 census, these errors are impossible to correct without an entirely new census. We have witnesses here today who can explain the technicalities.
▶ 0:22:55As our witnesses will highlight, the practice of differential privacy was derided by outside groups across the political and ideological spectrums, calling for the use of it to end. In fact, a 2021 Harvard study on differential privacy's effects on redistricting noted that quote, "It has a tendency to transfer population across ge geographies in ways that artificially reduce racial and partisan heterog heterogenity which makes it impossible to follow the principle of one person, one vote as
▶ 0:23:25it is currently interpreted by courts and policymakers together." Then the 2020 sanctuary uh sanctuary census denied Republicans 18 seats in the US House, 12 by counting illegal aliens, and another six by counting inaccurately. More importantly, it costs law- abiding citizens in states across the US their equal say in Congress and in presidential elections. Congress must act to ensure that at the very least that illegal aliens are not counted for the purposes of aortionment. Let's follow the Constitution.
▶ 0:23:53Let's stop enabling policies that encourage illegal immigration. Let's stop weaponizing the census for political gain and let's find bipartisan ways to improve the census and let's understand the technicalities that we're going to hear about today that we think have bipartisan agreement uh create problems in terms of the estimating procedures that are used in census and let's put the American people first. The people's house, the electoral college and all the elections and policies that flow from that should be representative of the American people.
▶ 0:24:23I now recognize the ranking member, Miss Scandlin, for her opening statement.
▶ 0:24:27Good morning and thank you to all of our witnesses for for being here. I look forward to hearing from you. As our founders recognize, the census is fundamental to our democracy, playing a critical role not just in governance, but in shaping decisions made by organizations and institutions across American life.
▶ 0:24:46An accurate census is essential for a fair distribution of political power here in Congress and for the equitable allocation of billions of dollars of federal funds to states and communities, including for programs like Medicaid, free and reduced school lunches, Head Start, SNAP. Its data is used by businesses and nonprofits to determine where and how to operate and by state and local governments to decide where to invest in public infrastructure like roads and hospitals and schools.
▶ 0:25:16But the census is not just some mathematical equation to distribute congressional seats and taxpayer dollars. It's deeply rooted in our founders vision of what a government buy and for the people should be. Alexander Hamilton is on record saying during the constitutional convention in Philadelphia, there can be no truer principle than this, that every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of the government.
▶ 0:25:44Ultimately, the census is a national snapshot we take every 10 years that helps us understand and define who we are, how to govern, and undermining that process in ways that distort that picture will harm all of us. That's why Democratic and Republican administrations alike have historically tried to protect the census from political interference and partisan pressures. But this president and his MAGA allies are deviating from that president once again trying to rig things in their favor.
▶ 0:26:15Now, these efforts aren't new. They began under the first administration when uh they tried to add an unprecedented citizenship question to the census. This was a blatant attempt by political appointees to exclude non-citizens from our count which they expected to quote benefit Republicans and non-Hispanic whites end quote and which was ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court.
▶ 0:26:41And those efforts continued with the development of the right-wing project 2025 manifesto which as predicted has become a playbook for the Trump administration. It devotes a whole section to plans to appoint political appointees loyal to the White House to lead the census in order quote to execute a conservative agenda end quote which includes trying to add a citizenship question again focusing census engagement on conservative groups and limiting
▶ 0:27:11efforts to engage historically marginalized and undercounted groups. Then earlier this year, President Trump reinstated a memo to the Commerce Department, ordering that the census not count undocumented immigrants when determining each state's share of congressional seats. And you know, we've just heard a little bit of that rationale, which really conflates the idea of who is in this country legally, not legally.
▶ 0:27:38I mean the we constantly hear from our colleagues here about illegal aliens not understanding that fully 404% of immigrants in [clears throat] our country are citizens that another 26% are legal permanent residents um that another 5% are here on visas. So the vast majority of immigrants in our country are in fact here legally as opposed to the constant refrain we hear from the other side of the aisle.
▶ 0:28:08So at any rate, the constitution's command is that the quote whole number of persons be counted. Um you know the president has also posted on his social media um that he wants his administration to start work on a new census. Um, and in a common theme of this administration, it blatantly ignores the fact that the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the authority to connect the to conduct the census.
▶ 0:28:37Our Constitution's framers understood the importance of having an accurate and comprehensive population count. That's reflected in the fact that article 1 section 2 clause 3 the enumeration clause mandates that representatives be aortioned among the states according to the whole number of persons in each state using an actual enumeration.
▶ 0:29:00Later on, the drafters of the 14th Amendment, [clears throat] excuse me, kept this phrasing while amending the clause to account for the end of slavery, reiterating that a state's representation in Congress must be determined by counting the whole number of persons in each state. So, it really couldn't be clearer. The census must count the whole number of persons, not just a subset of persons living in the US.
▶ 0:29:26The Constitution's drafters could have used a narrower term like citizens or voters or or something else, which they did, for example, in other parts of the 14th amendment, but they purposely use the broader term persons in the aortionment provision, making it clear that all people count, including women who could not yet vote at the time of that drafting, children, indentured servants who were often immigrants, and former slaves.
▶ 0:29:53and they rejected proposals that would re restrict the census to voters. Additionally, the requirement of an actual enumeration has never meant that census takers are only required to count only those who they can reach directly or in person. We know that the effort to count every person every decade has never been perfect and that's why there have been continual improvements over times and that's for a variety of reasons.
▶ 0:30:21and chief among them being that certain populations are difficult for census takers to reach. Um, renters are harder to reach than homeowners. Children are particularly tough to reach, especially if they are not reading and writing yet. But the Constitution does account for this. The Supreme Court made clear in Utah versus Evans that the Constitution doesn't specify exactly how the census should be counted.
▶ 0:30:45As the court noted, in that case, census takers implementing our very first count in the late 1700s were only required to report the names of household heads, which is very different from our system now. Our framers knew better than to try and anticipate the technology or methodology that America would need to conduct the count in the future, one that must capture the hundreds of millions of people living in the country today. Instead, the constitutional northstar they gave us for the census is simply that it be accurate.
▶ 0:31:14These ongoing efforts to cast doubts about the results of the 2020 census, the census that was conducted, I might add, while Donald Trump was president, are part of a larger scheme. One mega extremists have designed to redraw maps mid decade in a blatant power grab so that Republicans can win more seats in Congress and keep their majority despite the increasing unpopularity of their Project 2025 agenda.
▶ 0:31:40In effect, they're seeking a pre-jerrymander even as they attempt other gerrymanders. The ongoing lawsuit in Florida, which seeks to overturn the 2020 census by challenging some of its counting methodologies, fits right into this scheme. The suit filed against a Trump administration that's presumably sympathetic to the plaintiffs may be just the pretext this administration is looking for to push for a census redo. But if their efforts succeed, Americans will suffer.
▶ 0:32:10Undercounts and other counting errors particularly hurt vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations, including young children, racial and ethnic minorities, the transient and homeless, those in non-traditional housing arrangements, and those living in very rural or very dense urban communities. In other words, people living in America who patronize its businesses, drive on its roads, attend its schools, and use its essential public services. people who we need to have included in the count.
▶ 0:32:40If these lawsuits by plaintiffs get their way and the methods used to account for these populations are prohibited or limited, essentially putting the federal government's head in the sand will only move farther away from, not closer to an accurate and complete count. Federal funds will be misdirected. states, local governments, businesses, nonprofits, and others will make less informed decisions, inadvertently depriving people of what they need to live and thrive in our communities. And that is devastating for millions.
▶ 0:33:10Of course, we all want, as the chair suggests, our census picture to be fuller and more accurate. It's what our democracy demands, and we should all strive to improve our data collection and prevent underounts as we look forward to the scheduled regular 2030 census.
▶ 0:33:27But to [snorts] make that a reality, we should be talking about reforms that limit the executive branch's ability to interfere in the account for political purposes or reforms to ensure that the Census Bureau has adequate funding and flexibility to do the job right. We shouldn't try to curtail or ignore scientific methods which are available to complete such a huge undertaking or consider changes that make people trust this process less and rather than participating in it more.
▶ 0:33:58The census and its results are too consequential for that. So I look forward to hearing our discussion today and I yield back.
▶ 0:34:06I thank the ranking member and I will now recognize the ranking member of the full committee uh Mr. Raskin.
▶ 0:34:11Thank you Mr. Uh Roy, I appreciate it. Um the the call for a census and article one of the constitution plays an essential role in our democracy, guaranteeing for centuries that there will be an appropriate allocation of house seats and districts of equal population within each state. President Trump's extraordinary mid decade partisan gerrymander offensive has hit major roadblocks recently in California, in Utah, and in federal court in Texas.
▶ 0:34:40But his forces have continued on their path of destruction and are now targeting the 2020 census itself as a way to tear up the political map of the country. This week, President Trump released this telltale statement on social media. This all began with the rigged census. He said, "We must keep the majority at all costs. Republicans must fight back." So, what a syllogism we're offered because Trump must keep the majority at all costs.
▶ 0:35:08Therefore, the 2020 century censure census was rigged. Uh, this is lunacy. It's like saying because Trump had to win the 2020 election, he really wanted to win it, the election was rigged and he won it. Um, and that's just derangement. The 2020 census was not rigged.
▶ 0:35:28A 2024 report by the Government Accountability Office reviewing the accuracy of the census found that uh the accuracy of the 2020 national population count was consistent with the previous census.
▶ 0:35:42While the bureau's post enumeration survey estimated statistically significant net coverage errors in certain regions and states, um the uh the accuracy uh of the count was overall consistent and overounts and underounts at the margins are nothing new. The sentence census was not rigged.
▶ 0:36:05The actual institutional weakness of the census, as the GAO reported, is the chronic undercount of communities of color, which persisted through the 2020 census. In 2020, quote, in 2010, black or African-American and Hispanic persons, young children, and renters were systematically undercounted, while non-Hispanic white persons, adults over 50, and homeowners were overcounted. Are we going to have a hearing planned on that?
▶ 0:36:34Maybe on the same day we're going to be hearing with the Epstein victims. I don't know. The Census Bureau faced unprecedented challenges in conducting the 2020 census because of the raging global pandemic and the government's uh inadequate response to it. CO 19 significantly complicated sens census activities, many of which were suspended or delayed. In many states and localities, lockdowns and travel restrictions stopped the Census Bureau from accessing communities entirely.
▶ 0:37:04The bureau also had to contend with natural disasters in a number of states, as well as a planning budget that had been dramatically cut by the first Trump administration. These two are the real problems that we should be discussing today. Instead, uh, we seem to be wasting our time on a long list of fanciful, self-pleading theories that have no basis in law or history and that fly in the plain text of the Constitution.
▶ 0:37:29Before we assign blame for any actual or imagined inaccuracies in the results of the 2020 census, let it be clear that it was the first Trump administration that was responsible for preparing the 2020 census. And the greatest obstacle to an accurate 2020 census count was President Trump himself.
▶ 0:37:50He repeatedly sought to undermine the accuracy of the count by adding a citizenship question which experts warned would dramatically depress participation, including by American citizens, and skew the results for Democratic and Republican states alike.
▶ 0:38:05Thank goodness that the Roberts court thwarted uh that effort when it found that Trump's process was completely contrary to law and the president's pretext for adding the blatantly political citizenship question was quote contrived. The Trump administration told the court that they needed the citizen question to help enforce the Voting Rights Act.
▶ 0:38:28And then after oral arguments, evidence came to light indicating that the request of the administration, a GOP redistricting expert, had provided an analysis showing that the addition of a citizenship question to the census and the use of citizen-only data for redistricting would politically benefit Republicans and the white community. The Supreme Court found the administration's formal excuses completely unbelievable, calling them contrived.
▶ 0:38:56Now in a second term, Trump and his allies are once again seeking to weaponize the census in an unlawful way and undermining its accuracy. Trump instructed the Commerce Department to exclude undocumented immigrants from the Census count policy that one three judge panel said quote has already been rejected by the Constitution, the applicable statutes in 230 years of our history.
▶ 0:39:20The Constitution makes clear that the census includes quote the whole number of persons in each state to ensure a complete picture of who resides in the country. As Republican Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan stated during his introduction of the 14th Amendment in 1866, quote, "The basis of representation is numbers." That is the whole population. Numbers, not voters. Numbers, not property. That's the theory of our constitution.
▶ 0:39:46In the face of this overwhelming textual and historical evidence telling us that every person must be counted, some state officials have filed meritless lawsuits against the Commerce Department challenging the constitutionality of the Census Bureau's long-standing constitutionally mandated practice to count all persons who reside within the US regardless of their citizenship status.
▶ 0:40:09Right-wing legal activists in Florida have also filed suit against the Commerce Department, claiming that the census's use of group quarters count imputation and differential privacy violated the Constitution and the Census Act and call the accuracy of the census into question. Don't let the jargon or these tortured arguments fool you. The lawsuits are part of a coordinated strategy to give covered to this mid decade attack on the 2020 census's aortionment count ahead of the midterms.
▶ 0:40:39Our democracy and our society cannot afford our constitutional census being turned into a constant instrument of partisan conflict, division, and advantage. Let's reject this dangerous direction. And Mr. Chairman, I yield back to you. Well, I thank the ranking member. Without all without recognizing that Mr. Jordan is not here, without objection, all other opening statements will be included in the record.
▶ 0:41:07We will now introduce today's witnesses. Uh I'm going to start uh with Mr. Mayfield. Mr. Mayfield is a member at Chalmer's, Adams, Backer, and Kaufman where his practice includes complex commercial litigation, constitutional law, and administrative law. Prior to that, Mr. Mayfield was a partner at a boutique litigation firm, an assistant United States Attorney, and served as counsel to the director of the United States Census Bureau. Next, Mr. J. Rodriguez. Mr.
▶ 0:41:37Rodriguez is an assistant attorney general in the office of the Kansas Attorney General. He primarily works on cases involving constitutional issues and was the attorney of record on behalf of the Kansas attorney general in Louisiana versus Department of Commerce. Mr. Wde Miller. Mr. Miller currently serves as a senior adviser at the Center for Renewing America. Wade is a combat veteran who served in the United States Marine Corps as an infantryman deploying into combat theaters three times in Iraq and the Horn of Africa.
▶ 0:42:05He has significant experience and involvement in campaign activities, conservative grassroots movement and the public policy development. And for the record, he also served in my office uh in my first term in in Congress as my chief of staff. And Mr. Yang. Mr. Mr. Yang is the president and executive director at Asian-Americans Advancing Justice. AJC works to eliminate discrimination against and to advance the civil rights of Asian-Americans.
▶ 0:42:32We thank our witnesses for appearing today and we'll begin by swearing you in. Would you please rise and raise your right hand? Do you swear or affirm under penalty of perjury that the testimony you are about to give is true and correct to the best of your knowledge, information, and belief? So help you God. Witnesses answer uh answered in the affirmative. Let the record reflect that they have. Thank you. Please be seated. Please know that your written testimony will be entered into the record in its entirety.
▶ 0:43:02Accordingly, we ask that you summarize your testimony in five minutes. I'm going to start on the right here with Mr. Mayfield. You have five minutes and you may begin. right. Thank you, Chairman Roy, Ranking Member Scandlin, and members of the committee for inviting me here today to discuss issues related to the 2020 census.
▶ 0:43:29My name is Trey Mayfield, and I served as counsel to the director of the Census Bureau at the end of the first Trump administration, during which time many legal issues concerning the methodology, accuracy, and use of the 2020 census were raised. Our constitution is largely concerned with structuring our form of government and placing textual limits on power. The dennial census is one of the very few specific exercises of power mandated by the constitution. The census clause is firmly lodged in article one of the constitution.
▶ 0:43:57It is for constitutional purposes a congressional responsibility in order to aortion members of the house of representatives among the several states so that house membership proportionately reflects each state's population. Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3, mandates that there be quote, an actual enumeration, unquote, every 10 years. Section two of the 14th Amendment reiterates that requirement. When interpreting the Constitution, we must look to its text using the commonly understood meaning of the words at the time it was ratified in 1788.
▶ 0:44:28The Constitution requires the actual enumeration. Not surprisingly, dictionaries from the time demonstrate that an enumeration requires an actual counting and not just an estimation of members of numbers. The founders were well aware of the opportunities for fraud to inflate or deflate a given state's population in order to alter representation in the House. For that reason, the federal government was charged with conducting the census and doing so by actually counting, not estimating, how many people were living in the United States.
▶ 0:44:59Since 1790, Congress has consistently reaffirmed in census authorizing legislation that statistical adjustments are prohibited in determining our national population for aortionment purposes. To be sure, census data is used for many purposes other than aortionment, including dispersing federal funds to states and localities, obtaining demographic data, and ascertaining the state of the nation in such ways as the Congress and President deem appropriate.
▶ 0:45:24Some kinds of statistical adjustment are permissible in performing those functions, but not for enumeration. Congress has mandated the census quote be as accurate as possible unquote and banned the use of statistical adjustments for enumeration because it quote poses the risk of an inaccurate, invalid, and unconstitutional census. Within those limitations, Congress has delegated responsibility for implementing the census to the Secretary of Commerce and the Census Bureau.
▶ 0:45:51Congress also requires the president report to Congress the total population of the nation, each state, and the number of representatives to which each state is entitled. There is no law, however, prohibiting the president from reporting additional information to Congress in that report, such as the number of illegal aliens in the count and what results of the count would be in their absence. Congress has also prohibited the release of any census data whereby the person who provided the data could be identified.
▶ 0:46:19Purportedly to meet this requirement, civil servants at the bureau apply a methodology to the 2020 census called differential privacy. It violates the Constitution's actual enumeration requirement and the congressional prohibition on the use of such methods. They refused to allow their method to be peer-reviewed or to disclose the data upon which they concluded the differential privacy was needed instead of the method the bureau had previously used known as data swapping.
▶ 0:46:46using differential privacy altered both the count and the characteristics of individuals and households reported at the region, district, town, and census block level. In essence, the bureau's reported population moved people around within states. For instance, when testing differential privacy using the data from the 2010 census, the population of Port Royal, Virginia was artificially increased 87%. While the population of Stony Creek, Virginia was decreased by 43%.
▶ 0:47:17In other words, differential privacy results in people from larger subgroups and geographic units being moved to smaller ones. Opposition to differential privacy was unanimous among census stakeholders. Every letter the bureau received from outside scientists and statisticians came to the same conclusion. Differential privacy is illegal. It is data corrupting and it addresses a non-existent problem.
▶ 0:47:42It was also opposed unanimously by governmental actors and interest groups for reasons as straightforward that using fake population data makes it difficult for governments to carry out core responsibilities such as drawing district lines and determining where to locate bus stops in schools and how to allocate welfare. Studies since the 2020 census have confirmed that this is exactly what differential privacy does. It adds fake people to where they do not live and subtracts real people from where they do live.
▶ 0:48:10Thus, all of the reported enumeration census data from 2020 below the state level is false. I welcome the committee's questions.
▶ 0:48:20Thank you, Mr. Mayfield. I'll now recognize Mr. Rodriguez for five
▶ 0:48:25Thank you, Chairman Roy, Ranking Member Scanland, and members of the committee. I'm an assistant attorney general in the special litigation and constitutional issues division of the Kansas Attorney General's Office. And in that role, I'm leading a multi-state federal lawsuit against the Department of Commerce challenging its practice of counting illegal aliens in the census. M
▶ 0:48:48Mr. Rodriguez, can you move a little closer to your microphone or ensure that it's on?
▶ 0:48:51Sorry. Is that better?
▶ 0:48:52That's better. Yes.
▶ 0:48:54Uh when illegal aliens are counted, it inflates the count for a few states with high numbers of illegal aliens and gives th those states more political power and representation at the expense of states with smaller numbers of illegal aliens. that violates the constitution which requires an actual enumeration of inhabitants to be used for aortioning house seats and it violates the principle of equal representation by making votes in some states count less than votes in others. The census comes out of article 1 section two of the constitution.
▶ 0:49:24It requires congress to conduct an actual enumeration to be used in the aortionment of representatives and electoral college votes according to the respective numbers in each state. In the founding era, numbers referred to inhabitants, which meant someone with a fixed and permanent connection to the place and some legitimate tie to the political community. Under that definition, illegal aliens are not inhabitants. They're present in the US illegally, subject to removal, and their residence is therefore temporary and contingent.
▶ 0:49:55They're not bonafide members of the state. So, they should not be included in any enumeration for purposes of aortionment. Historically, Congress has delegated its constitutional authority over the census to the Secretary of Commerce under the SEC census act. And the census is conducted according to the rules promagated by the Secretary. Every census in aortionment, including the most recent one in 2020, has counted illegal aliens at their usual residence.
▶ 0:50:20Although it's only in the last few decades that the scale of illegal immigration has significantly affected In the Supreme Court, there are two broad categories of cases that are relevant to these issues. The first concerns equal representation or the principle of one person, one vote. Starting in the 1960s, the Supreme Court found that debasement of votes or vote dilution is a justitable injury.
▶ 0:50:45And when state voting districts are unequal in population, it means that votes in less populous districts count more than votes in more populous districts, which violates the equal protection clause and the aortionment uh and the court has held that districts must be equal in terms of total population not in terms of the number of eligible voters. But in these cases, the court set the lower boundary of who should be counted. It hasn't set the upper boundary.
▶ 0:51:11Even though total population we know is more than just eligible voters, we don't know that it must include illegal aliens. The second category of relevant cases concerns the conduct of the census. Uh, for example, in Department of Commerce versus New York, the court held that asking a question about citizenship was permitted by the Enumeration Clause given Congress's quote unlimited discretion to conduct the census.
▶ 0:51:39But including the question violated the Administrative Procedure Act, without an APA violation, a citizenship question could likely be included in the next if it was produced by a reasoned decision-making process. And in Trump versus New York in 2020, the court heard a challenge to a Trump administration memo which planned to exclude illegal aliens from the already completed census to the extent feasible.
▶ 0:52:07The court dismissed the case for lack of standing since there was no certainty that anyone would actually be removed from the census pursuant to the memo, but it did not rule on the legality of excluding illegal aliens from an actual So, the census cases show that Congress has broad authority over what information is collected in the census and that counting illegal aliens remains an open question.
▶ 0:52:31The court has not said whether the Constitution requires counting illegal aliens or prohibits it or whether Congress has discretion to decide one way or the other. So, the future of the census will be decided in the courts and in Congress. Thank you.
▶ 0:52:48Thank you, Mr. Rodriguez. I'll now turn to Mr. Miller, you have five minutes. Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, thank you for inviting me to testify about the serious flaws in the 2020 census caused by the Census Bureau's first ever use of differential privacy. Differential privacy is an algorithm that deliberately injects noise in plain English false data into census results below the state level data all the way down to individual blocks.
▶ 0:53:14It alters racial and household composition, changes population counts, and even shifts those fabricated numbers to entire entirely different neighborhoods, cities, or counties. Census employees will say they are statutoily required to protect privacy as justification for choosing differential privacy to achieve that goal. Under differential privacy, the bureau insists that state level totals remain accurate, but everything below that level is intentionally distorted. The amount of distortion is top secret.
▶ 0:53:42Only a handful of bureau officials know the true unaltered numbers. The consequences are severe and criticisms bipartisan. Harvard data scientists found that differential privacy artificially reduces racial and partisan diversity, making it impossible to achieve genuine one-person, one vote equality.
▶ 0:53:59The MexicanAmerican Legal Defense and Education Fund and Asian-Americans Advancing Just Justice concluded that the data altered by this method are too inaccurate to satisfy the Voting Rights Act or the equal population requirements for Rural and low population areas suffered the greatest proportional harm, distorting the partisan makeup of Congress and potentially affecting billions in federal funding. Differential privacy also has three fatal structural flaws. One, it renders the count question resolution process meaningless.
▶ 0:54:28localities can no longer tell whether a number is wrong because of an actual counting error or because the bureau intentionally falsified it. Two, it injects distorted data into every state's redistricting process, casting doubt on the legitimacy of district lines.
▶ 0:54:43Three, it effectively gives bureaucrats a permanent tool to obscure non-citizen and illegal immigrant populations, nullifying any future citizenship question and shifting political power away from American Some limited analysis suggests an estimated 2% movement of numerical population data, but some reporting has suggested that upwards of 20% movement is allowable. Either way, this poses serious constitutional concerns. Compounding these problems, the 2020 census was the most inaccurate in modern history.
▶ 0:55:12The bureau's own post numeration survey admittedly admitted statistically significant underounts in six states, mostly red states, Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. And overounts in eight states, mostly blue states, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Utah. Those er errors alone shifted at least six congressional seats and electoral votes to the wrong states. Those errors all benefited Democrats.
▶ 0:55:40When you combine known political imbalances in the raw count with an opaque algorithm that deliberately moves and alters population data and all of those problems coincidentally mathematically tend to benefit the left, it is reasonable for Americans to conclude that the 2020 census was weaponized if not intentionally through malpractice. Public trust in the Census Bureau has been badly damaged as a result. Restoring that trust is simple.
▶ 0:56:04Congress and the current and next administration must correct the errors committed by the census bureaucracy leading up to the 2020 census and permanently prohibit the use of differential privacy. Differential privacy policy for the purposes of satisfying statutory privacy requirements is insufficient as a justification. Statutory privacy requirements cannot serve as grounds for ignoring the constitutional requirements that flow from census data.
▶ 0:56:30The 2030 census returns need to be accurate, transparent, and politically neutral, the way the Constitution demands. Thank you. I look forward to your questions.
▶ 0:56:41Thank you, Mr. Miller. I'll now turn to Mr. Yang, and you have five minutes.
▶ 0:56:45Thank you. Good morning, Chairman Roy, Ranking Member Scland, Committee Chair Jordan, and Ranking Member Rasin. Thank you for inviting me to testify here today. My name is John C. Yang. I'm the president and executive director of Asian-Americans Advancing Justice, AJC. AJC is part of a national network that includes independent affiliates in Atlanta, Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well as 37 community partners in in 37 different states, as well as the District of Columbia.
▶ 0:57:10We have served uh on numerous advisory committees for the Census Bureau, including the most recent 2030 Census Advisory Committee. We maintain a permanent census program that ma monitors census policy, educates policy makers, and conducts community outreach and education. I appreciate this opportunity to testify before all of you on the importance of the accuracy of the census. An inaccurate census hurts everyone in this country. Over 2.2 trillion in federal funding is allocated based on census data.
▶ 0:57:40State and local governments decide where to build hospitals, where to build schools, how to widen highways based on the census data. businesses decide where to put new stores, what inventory to include in those new stores based on democrat demographic data provided by the census. That's why every administration going back to 1790, whether Republican, Democrat, wig, federalist, democratic, republican, has supported policies and supported a budget to fund an accurate census.
▶ 0:58:08Traditionally, ensuring accurate census has been a bipartisan endeavor and it has been about science and it has been about statistics. Under the constitution, the census requires the counting of the whole number of persons. The Supreme Court as well as the text and history of the 14th amendment makes clear that aortionment is based on total population and not subsets. Arguments about counts based solely on immigration status or eligible voters have been repeatedly rejected by Congress and the courts.
▶ 0:58:36Any attempt to add a question concerning citizenship or immigration status will only make the census inaccurate. Studies have repeatedly shown that questions such as the citizenship question only cause p people to decline to participate in the census. To be clear, those persons are not limited to non-citizens, but also include households that include both citizens and non-citizens. Such inaccuracies will mean that resources will not be distributed appropriately throughout the country.
▶ 0:59:04It also contradicts the Constitution's edict to equal representation for all. The Census Bureau is committed to producing and disseminate objective, credible, and useful statistics to support the decision-making of governments, businesses, philanthropy, and social service organizations. Although the total population count of the 2020 census did not see a significant overcount or undercount, we did see that specific populations did have underounts.
▶ 0:59:29The 2020 census showed an undercount for children under four of over 5% of rural areas were underounted by around 4%. The Hispanic community was undercounted by over 5%, the African-American community by around 3% and the American Indian tribal population by over 5%. Now, two common reasons exists for underounts. First is anti-government san sent sentiment and privacy concerns are causing people to resist sharing information with the government.
▶ 0:59:57Less than a third of the US population have trust in the federal government. Accordingly, the Census Bureau takes its responsibil responsibility to maintain the confidentiality of the information very very seriously by ensuring that personally identifiable information is not shared or distributed to any other government or any other agency at any level. Now, differential privacy is simply one means for accomplishing that confidentiality.
▶ 1:00:22Basically, it creates statistical noise to mask personally identifiable characteristics that could be revealed when census data is overlaid with against other publicly available data. Now, to be clear, and everyone has agreed, differential privacy is not used at the state level and therefore has no effect on aortionment. Now, the second common reason for underounts is a lack of a robust get out the count program, especially for communities that are traditionally undercounted or difficult to count.
▶ 1:00:49States that invest in their census outreach and invest in their operations are more likely to have accurate counts when compared to states that did not invest in their populations. A state's lack of investment in their census therefore not only results in a potential loss of representation in Congress, but also in a loss of resources. For example, many experts expected that Alabama would lose a congressional seat in the 2020 census.
▶ 1:01:12The state however invested in get out count operations at an early stage and Governor Ivy was very vocal in pushing Alamans to participate. As a result, the state did not lose a seat. In conclusion, it is clear that calling all persons, not just citizens or legal residents, is a constitutional requirement that is also critical for determining the allocation of federal funds and for making databased business decisions.
▶ 1:01:37Rather than seeking to exclude certain classes of people from the count, policymakers and the Census Bureau must do everything they can to ensure that everyone is counted. Thank you again for the opportunity to testify. I look forward to questions.
▶ 1:01:49Thank you for your opening statement, uh, Mr. Yang. We will now proceed under the five-minute rule with questions. The chair [clears throat] recognized the gentleman from North Carolina for five
▶ 1:01:59Thank you very much, Mr. chairman and thank you for holding this hearing on this very important matter and thank you all on the panel for your presence today and for your expertise uh that you bring to the table. Uh I want to take just a moment to talk about the importance of including a citizenship question in our census and I want to come to you Mr. Miller. Uh should the census include a citizenship question?
▶ 1:02:24Yes, I would argue that it is uh mandated in terms of what the census is seeking to produce from a a constitutional perspective. So, knowing citizenship or residency status, lawful permanent residence status, uh or otherwise is important in understanding how all of the total population fits into what you must do with that data.
▶ 1:02:47Thank you. And has the census ever included a citizenship question? That's a good question. Historically, did anyone I think it has historically, but I has not recently. Uh, they tried to get that going last time and ran into APA violation issues. Uh, and so it was not included.
▶ 1:03:04And that and I kind of follow up to that um because I think it has. And why was the question removed? That would be the the real question here.
▶ 1:03:13I are you asking me to speculate? So I I suspect that it was an attempt to try to increase population levels in ways that would help certain states because they're now counting uh uh illegal immigrants for the purposes of aortionment and illegal immigrants and legal uh immigrants for the purposes of
▶ 1:03:35Okay. And what are some of the effects of leaving a citizenship question out of the census? If you don't know accurate citizen uh status, then if you if you if your argument is that it is uh that constitutionally you should only be creating political districts with uh those are here lawful permanent residents and citizens or just citizens, then you need to know that data in order to create political maps that reflect that data set.
▶ 1:04:05if that's your objective.
▶ 1:04:06Sure. So, the result of our census not only controls how congressional and state districts are drawn, but it also directs the flow of federal dollars. I mean, we talk about Medicaid, highway funds, education, SNAP benefits, all use population and demographic data, uh, demographic data from the census to award funds.
▶ 1:04:28And so when we don't distinguish between citizens and non-citizens when determining our population, it incentivizes states to mass import illegals through sanctuary policies. Now, we just went through the big beautiful bill or working families tax act and we made an effort to ensure illegals are not accessing welfare programs, but I'm worried that when we allow them to be considered for purposes of determining benefit formulas, it undermines that purpose. So, Mr.
▶ 1:04:57Miller, do you agree that including illegal aliens in population totals for federal programs undermines the recent reforms to prohibit illegal aliens from taking benefits away from Americans? Certainly. Now, there so there's two questions here. Should you count them and then how should that data be used and in what for what purposes?
▶ 1:05:18But certainly if you are counting illegal aliens and you don't know their location and the location of those illegal aliens because of differential privacy is being moved around that would have significant impacts on every single federal funding formula assuming that memorandums of understanding are not being properly submitted to the census to ascertain accurate information on ways to disperse those federal funds.
▶ 1:05:41Agreed. And I would submit that when we allow illegal aliens to be counted toward the total population for the purposes of determining welfare award numbers, it distorts the proper amount that should be given to that community. And that ultimately puts a further strain on on the federal budget. Um, Mr. Mayfield, let me ask you real quickly in the last moment I have.
▶ 1:06:02I'm I'm very grateful to be serving in the House of Representatives, which is a Democratic body, but I worry that the errors in the 2020 census undermine this institution and its purposes, which is to represent the American people. Can you, Mr. Mayfield, explain how the way in which the 2020 census was conducted undermined the representation of the American
▶ 1:06:29Thank you for that question, Congressman. It's important in asking that question to make a distinction between two things. The gathering of the data, the collection, and the processing of that data. The gathering of the data by the census in 2020 was exemplary. As your colleague, Mr. Raskin pointed out, the COVID pandemic made things extremely difficult. Uh there were also hurricanes that affected in particular Alabama and Louisiana. And so the collection was delayed.
▶ 1:06:56The collection was tied for the most successful census in history. We had a 99.98 household contact rate. I say we, I had nothing to do with that. The bureau did. Um there were three primary reasons for that success. Number one, President Trump insisted that the census follow regular order and not make shortcuts in the census.
▶ 1:07:18Number two, um the census had done a good job over the previous decade implementing technology um and cutting out many many layers of needless followup uh including using administrative records such as the postal service. Uh and three uh as you may recall the census lockdown day was March 18th as chance would happen it census day is April 1st. So virtually everyone was in their home once they got done watching Tiger King. They decided to fill out their census forms.
▶ 1:07:48The problem that the people here have spoken to here today comes in this census is data processing. The largest problem was differential privacy which as several speakers have alluded moves people around in the modeling prior to the census that was done in the University of Virginia under a census contract. It basically I'm summing summing this up moved people from urban areas to rural areas where they did not exist. Um you can all discern from that if that's true what the political modeling would look like.
▶ 1:08:17Um, another major problem in mfield if you can wrap this up.
▶ 1:08:21Sure. We're a little over time.
▶ 1:08:22Group quarters was a problem because colleges in particular uh and other large quarters were double counted. The census went back and changed the data to assume that people were they thought they were instead of just where they were when they answered the census.
▶ 1:08:35Thank you. I'm out of time. Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
▶ 1:08:38Thank you, Mr. Mayfield. Thank you, gentleman from North Carolina. I'm now going to recognize the gentleman from Maryland, the ranking member of the committee, Mr. Raskin.
▶ 1:08:45And thank you kindly, Mr. Chairman. Um, Mr. Yang, first of all, the section one of the 14th amendment states that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States. And then in section two, it says that representative shall be aortioned among the states according to their respective numbers counting the whole number of persons in each state. So obviously the the framers of the 14th amendment understood the difference between citizens and persons and they used citizens when they meant citizens. They used persons when they meant persons.
▶ 1:09:15Um, doesn't that pretty much settle this bizarrely lingering question of whether or not we should be counting uh all persons or just citizens when we perform the census.
▶ 1:09:29That's absolutely correct. Is if thank you for that question. If you look at the text of the constitution and the 14th amendment, it counts all persons in in the state. And frankly some of the history both of the 14th amendment and going back to the founding of the constitution illustrate that they wanted to count the entire population and not simply voters not simply land owners and obviously at that point uh women could not vote obviously children could not vote so they want to include the entire population.
▶ 1:09:55Frankly this debate also came up in 1929 during what was called the aortionment act. That was the only time in Congress after 1920 census where this uh where we did not have aortionment. And in that debate, part of the debate was whether certain people should be counted. And during that debate, the end of the debate, everyone decided that it is still based on all population. But during that debate, some argued that people should not be counted.
▶ 1:10:19Specifically, one representative argued that the counting it should count only voters or citizens because otherwise it would include the thousands of unnaturalized aliens. Another representative said say that they didn't want to count me thousands of Mexicans and oriental aliens and that those people would end up somehow giving extra seats to California in that particular case. When they talk about oriental aliens, I will take that personally because at that time there was a Chinese Exclusion Act which meant that that Chinese were not citizens.
▶ 1:10:47Nevertheless, during that time it was settled that it should still be all population for purpose of the census.
▶ 1:10:53Right. And and of course at various points in American history, the determination to count just voters would have excluded women, Native Americans today, children still, right? So um will you explain this controversy around differential privacy, which seems to be a new one. Will you explain what that means, what the practice is, and then what your responses to your your fellow uh panelists there? And uh specifically, if you would address Mr.
▶ 1:11:20Mayfield's last point that I I think this is inflating the population of rural communities by falsely attributing people from urban communities to rural communities which which would seem to me to be inflating the numbers in red districts but
▶ 1:11:38no thank you for that question again the starting point is that differential privacy was not used at the state level
▶ 1:11:45what it is for sure so differential privacy is basically the notion that you will inject some polic statistical noise but masking data uh in the the census data you you typically you would take a certain piece of data and transfer it to another individual so that you can't identify individual A because concern with big tech now with big data individual A if you have enough information both from the census and what is available on the web it it you know you might be able to identify that person oh that must be so and so
▶ 1:12:15who lives on this block so the concern was we needed to uh de divide a system that would take some of the data, switch it around so that you can't identify that individual. But again, it was not used at the state level. So any argument that somehow a state got less seats or state got more seats because of it because of it is just not
▶ 1:12:34So where was it used?
▶ 1:12:36So it was used certainly at the lower
▶ 1:12:38What do you mean? Do you mean at the county or municipal levels?
▶ 1:12:41Right. So at what's called the census block level, census track level. that was used there. And I I agree that it there could be concerns about how you use that. But at the end of the day, everyone that's been doing redistricting still uses that data, the data that's available, what's called PL9.
▶ 1:12:56When the Trump administration administered that or implemented that in the 2020 census, was that the first time it was ever used?
▶ 1:13:03Yes, that was the first time that it was ever used.
▶ 1:13:06Okay. And so, Mr. Mr. Mayfield was your point that we shouldn't be using that anymore even if it doesn't affect congressional reaportionment. It affects local aortionment in like city council races, county council, things like that.
▶ 1:13:20To to clarify, Congressman, it affects all redistricting within a state. So my friend's point is that if Indiana has a population, say of 3 million, that's probably correct within the normal parameters of of accuracy. But how Indiana's nine congressmen, I apologize if I got that wrong, are allocated is going to be incorrect and down to the legislative and district and town levels, that error will go permeate within each state below the state level.
▶ 1:13:46When he refers to aortionment, he means the number of representatives that are allocated to each state after the
▶ 1:13:53With your indulgence, Mr. Chair, I just ask him to finish this point. Well, so why was this differential privacy thing adopted? What what problem was it addressing and what would the alternative be to the problem of not being able to get in particular people's houses if they don't open the door or
▶ 1:14:09Sure. Um well, differential p privacy has nothing to do with collection. It has to do with ensuring that section 9 of title 13 is adhered to and that in that congress has prohibited the release of personal information based on using the data. So in other words, we don't release the raw data, the short form that everyone fills out. That data is very basic. There are basically nine questions. name, phone number, address, racial characteristic, your rel your relationship to the household head, um your gender.
▶ 1:14:37Um the only real personal information on that is name, address, phone number, and so census has always kept the granular data out of the public eye. So you don't you can't get census data that's actually collected. Um, in the past three censuses, 2010, 2020, uh, sorry, 2010, 2000, and 1990, the bureau used what's called data swapping. And so, imagine you have a block.
▶ 1:15:06There are five houses on each side of the block. Because the the smallest unit of data that that is public release is at the block level, the bureau scramles that data. So, you don't know if there's a 20-year-old living on this side and a young daughter living on this side. Um, but that was always used. There was never a problem with it. And no one outside of the people driving differential privacy thought there was a problem and they advocated for continuing to use that
▶ 1:15:38I think I thank the ranking member for his question and and I'm going to use a little prerogative because there's some technical stuff here particularly when it's a nonpartisan point. So, I don't mind it going over uh in on either side because this this differential privacy is highly complex and I do think this committee on a nonpartisan basis, we need to understand it and understand it fully. So, um I'll try to allow some of that uh explanation as necessary kind of on both sides where it's appropriate.
▶ 1:16:06With that, I would be uh recognizing the gentleman from California, my friend Mr.
▶ 1:16:11Thank you. Uh uh Mr. Rodriguez. Um, if the 14th Amendment actually confers automatic citizenship to anyone who's born here, as the Democrats contend, seems to me it would have said all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States. Period. That's pretty clear. But, as you know, that's not what it says. It says all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States. What does that mean?
▶ 1:16:42Well, the the courts have interpreted subject to the jurisdiction thereof in other contexts uh for purposes of due process or equal protection and it's certainly been broader than uh naturalized uh or or legal residence. Um, so it's
▶ 1:17:01but has has the Supreme Court ever rendered a decision on uh whether it applies to those who are illegally in this country who have never sworn allegiance to it and uh have defied its laws to be here in the first place and under its laws are subject to deportation as as soon as encountered.
▶ 1:17:22Um, I I realize the the ARC decision was rendered 127 years ago, but but that applied to legal immigrants who accepted the jurisdiction of the United States by obeying our immigration laws and who taken up legal permanent residence subject to a treaty ratified by the
▶ 1:17:42Right? There seems to be no directly on point Supreme Court decision uh that says that the children of illegal immigrants are or are not citizens.
▶ 1:17:53So perhaps we're due to have that at some point decided by the Supreme Court or decided by the people through constitutional amendment or statute. Am I correct?
▶ 1:18:02It it does seem like it will be heard in the near future. M
▶ 1:18:06Mr. Mayfield, it seems to me that that a census is neither science nor statistics. Census is counting real people. Um uh people have names, dates of birth, uh addresses and other identifying information. How can it possibly be that we include in our census any count without names and and such identifying characteristics?
▶ 1:18:32Seems to me if you don't have a person, they shouldn't be counted in a census of How did we deviate from this simple
▶ 1:18:42If I understand your cor your question, Congressman, um the first aspect of the census is voluntary um compliance with it. Every American is required to answer it by law, but the deal that Congress has made is that that information will not be disclosed. In fact, it cannot even be subpoenaed by a court. That's just how tight the information is kept.
▶ 1:19:06So approximately 67% of Americans voluntarily filled out the short form which is what is your household data as of April 1st 2020. So for the remaining third of the country the census endeavors to learn that information and so it does so
▶ 1:19:22you knock on the door you get a count of the people who actually live there. you enter them on the census register. That's been done since time in memoriam. But I'm reading now of of statistical errors that uh uh shifted the u aortionment of congressional seats away from uh Republican states toward Democratic states. Now, how can that be if we're actually counting real people?
▶ 1:19:48It's important to remember, Congressman, that several members have alluded to so-called errors after the fact. The census does what's called the post enumeration survey. Um that is modeling. That is statistical statistical guess.
▶ 1:20:02How how did we reach a point where we're guessing in the census either either you're a real person or you're not. If if you're not, you don't belong in the census. If you are, we count you. Well,
▶ 1:20:13as Justice Scalia pointed out in Department of Commerce versus the House of Representatives, it's imperfect science enumeration, but it's better than anything else we got.
▶ 1:20:22It's not science. It's the matter. It's it's a simple matter of counting real
▶ 1:20:27Well, Congressman, there are many people who are very hard to reach. For instance, homeless people, which the census works very hard to count. There are people
▶ 1:20:35very hard to find them. But if you can't find them, you don't make them up. That's not a real census. That's that's guesswork. Mr. Miller, any thoughts? Yeah, it is extremely important that the data that is collected at least the the sensitive top secret version of this data be highly accurate and that we don't just invent people because like former processes have just swapped people.
▶ 1:20:57The new process literally deconstructs a person and every characteristic and then just in the aggregate creates them elsewhere in a whole bunch of different profiles all over the map. It's a complete mess. Uh there's all sorts of constitutional problems with the way we've done it that have impacted redistricting.
▶ 1:21:13And there there are some arguments that if you want if you don't want to count illegal aliens for the purposes of aortionment because your argument is that they are not under the political jurisdiction of the United States of America uh at the time of birth that uh that would impact aortionment because uh if you're using differential privacy you may not know uh we don't know what they're doing with that characteristic data. Is it actually adding up all the way to the top accurately or not? And the biggest problem with all of this is we assume it is.
▶ 1:21:41We it may not be impacting a portionment, but it's all top secret. We don't have eyes on it. We can't verify it. No one can go right now and say that 100% yes. All of this data, even the characteristic data, let alone the population data is accurate. And that's a huge problem.
▶ 1:21:58Thank gentleman from California. I will now recognize uh the gentle lady from Washington, Miss J. Paul.
▶ 1:22:03Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman. Um, I think we all agree on the importance of accuracy in our census results. I I am concerned about um some of the actions that are being advocated for as actually undermining some of that accuracy.
▶ 1:22:17And I want to turn to the citizenship question first and put aside the constitution um which is a strange thing to say in the constitution subcommittee, but to not necessarily look at what the constitution says specifically persons rather than just citizens and actually talk about um how adding a uh citizenship question would make the census less accurate. And so I'm going to come to you, Mr.
▶ 1:22:45Yang because um there is a lot of data that shows that communities of color, including American have been historically undercounted. And um this underounting question is directly related to what might happen if a citizenship question was added to the census.
▶ 1:23:08And so can you speak to how adding a citizenship question actually hurts us in terms of accuracy and and increasing underounting.
▶ 1:23:20Thank you for that question representative. The bottom line is we want an accurate census. All the studies that we have seen is including by the census bureau show that the addition of a citizenship question will undermine the accuracy of the census not only for uh immigrants but for all Americans because there's a hesitancy about how that data is going to be used.
▶ 1:23:41So in and that was documented especially in even going up to the 2020 census even after the Supreme Court decision that said that we cannot have the citizenship question there are still people that were concerned about whether that question appeared. That is part of the reason why many believe that uh Hispanic Americans were undercounted by over 5%.
▶ 1:24:01The other thing that we should remember about this is actually so there is a citizenship question on what's called the long form the American community survey of the of the of the census. Now that is a form that contains 50 questions. It has been tested in terms of how we can do that in a way that captures the data accurately. So again the bottom line is accuracy. So let me go to the question of underounting.
▶ 1:24:24If if there is underounting, substantial underounting, how does that underount harm American citizens in terms of how the census is utilized?
▶ 1:24:34Well, the undercount affects American citizens then because we will have areas where there's more population than was expected, even though the roads are not wide enough, even though the schools are not big enough, even though the public services are not big enough. And let's be clear, right? Highways, public services aren't dependent on immigrant status. it's dependent on the actual residents that live in that community.
▶ 1:24:55And so, um, give me some of the other reasons for anyone that's listening to this debate and trying to understand it for why non-citizens should be counted. And again, you know, we're clear about what the constitution says, but but go
▶ 1:25:09Again, why non-citizens should be counted is because they are part of the entire community that we're talking about. When we first we break it down in terms of non-com non-citizens obviously that that would include people that are legal permanent residents. That would include people that are refugees, it includes a large body of commun that participate in that community that deserve to have a voice in that community and nevertheless have not yet attained this notion of citizenship.
▶ 1:25:34And historically that's been part of the debates that we've had whether it was for the 14th amendment the original founding of the constitution or as I pointed out in the 1929 aortionment act. And we've always agreed with the general principle that we should represent the entire population and not just a small subset of that population.
▶ 1:25:52Yeah. And I think that's very real that we have many many mixed status families in this country. And so you know if you insert fear into one group of people it certainly affects the entire family's trust in government. I appreciate that you bring up the notion of mixed status families. What that means is you have a family that has some citizens, some non-citizens, maybe even someone that is undocumented. In that situation, that citizen in that household would not get the services that they would be entitled to because of the fact that they are not being counted correctly.
▶ 1:26:21I I wanted to go back to differential privacy because as as the chairman knows this is an issue where we all have a lot of concerns about surveillance and I I guess I want to understand um why we would want to eliminate that ability to uh really mask you know the characteristics so that we can we can um get accurate assessments. So I wonder if you want to speak to that. Yeah.
▶ 1:26:46And I think the bottom line here is how do we guarantee confidentiality for the community so that the community can can trust that when they are responding to the census their identity will not be will not be made public. And the reason this differential privacy policy was developed was because of the advent of big data. Now you are able to get so much more information about individuals off of the internet. So that what might have been unidentifiable before by simply swapping data at that block level is not going to be enough.
▶ 1:27:15So that is why this is developed. I I agree that we all have concerns. We've asked questions about how this is implemented and perhaps some fine-tuning is appropriate. But that that is a proper source of inquiry, but the notion of disregarding it all together, I think would be would
▶ 1:27:30and and what would be the finetuning?
▶ 1:27:33I I think this is where we all need to continue to work with the Census Bureau to see what worked, what didn't. the census bureau what when they said that they were announcing this differential privacy policy among other things they said that for 95% of the jurisdictions they expected error rate of under 5%. So in that context then you start to understand okay this should this this data at these levels still should be accurate. Now I I would agree we need to test that and to see where those 5% did not work what that actually looks like. I think that's an appropriate area for
▶ 1:28:03Great. Thank you. Thank you Mr.
▶ 1:28:05Thank gentle lady for her questions. I will now uh represent Mr. Honor.
▶ 1:28:09Thank [snorts] you, Mr. Chairman. I couldn't agree more with President Trump that we need to restore the integrity of our census, and that begins with refusing to count illegal aliens in our census. For too long, sanctuary states have openly defied federal laws and re been rewarded with more political power, more congressional seats, and more influence. This is unacceptable and it's undermining the very foundation of equal representation.
▶ 1:28:39Meanwhile, states like Missouri that I represent that follow and respect the law have a diluted voice in Washington. And not because we have done anything wrong, but because other states have chosen to disregard federal immigration law and they benefit politically by doing so. Uh Mr. Rodriguez.
▶ 1:28:59Um, you know, doesn't this mean that sanctuary policies, if we count illegal aliens in the census, have the effect of giving Democrats an unfair advantage in Congress, in the electoral college, and in federal
▶ 1:29:14To to some extent, I don't think it's entirely partisan, though. There are red states like Texas uh which also have uh disproportionate levels of of illegal aliens in their state and they also benefit but
▶ 1:29:30for sure California has been the state that has benefited most from this
▶ 1:29:33Yeah. But Texas does not have a sanctuary state policy of course. So if illegal immigrants are excluded from aortionment accounts, wouldn't we see some shift in political power back to states that follow the law?
▶ 1:29:48Yeah. And because census results also determine how literally trillions of dollars of federal dollars are distributed. Um are my constituents in Missouri subsidizing sanctuary states with with large illegal alien
▶ 1:30:04They likely are. And it's important to note that under federal law, the Personal Responsibility and Work Organization Reconciliation Act of 1996, uh, prohibits illegal aliens from receiving federal benefits. So, calculations for federal benefit purposes that are based on illegal alien populations are wrong under the law.
▶ 1:30:29Right? And so again, we know that looking back on the 2020 census, uh it is clear the the Census Bureau has admitted that there were errors um in states um in the counting of states and five of the six states that were undercounted were red states and seven of the eight states that were overcounted were blue or swing states. Um Mr.
▶ 1:30:52Miller, can you explain how how these inaccuracies in the 2020 census occurred and um you know and and and what what can be done differently uh in in the 2030 census?
▶ 1:31:06So the the census excuse [clears throat] me the Census Bureau would argue that these were difficulties that they encountered due to COVID and that that was kind of a historical uh unprecedented event that occurred during a census at least in modern times that I'm aware of. Uh I think that that's
▶ 1:31:23excuse me if I interrupt it seems like everything is blamed on CO you know right supply chains co educational lack of educational attainment co workforce co what what specifically how did how did fighting this virus lead to these
▶ 1:31:40Well that's why it just doesn't make much sense to me because the states that were underounted were generally more
▶ 1:31:46and people wearing gloves and masks and not able to out properly. I don't know.
▶ 1:31:49Yeah. And the states that were overcounted were the ones that were locked down and closed more so than so I I just don't understand the whole co logic. I'll take them at their word, but it's it's certainly a strange outcome. Yeah. Maybe everyone at the Census Bureau working from home and not actually out counting counting uh persons. Um do we really know the full extent, Mr. Miller, of the 2020 census censuses inaccuracies? I mean if they admit to this is
▶ 1:32:16no they have admitted to major miscounts. Uh we do not know the extent to which differential privacy has had an impact because the tiger file that all of this exists at the census bureau is top secret. only a few people have access to it.
▶ 1:32:29And this is an oversight problem that uh we we really need to get some data statisticians in there to really analyze with clearance to analyze the impacts because whether it's urban to rural or rural to urban there has been a lot of population movement and I've seen studies arguing both sides of this but there are big problems with this on a variety of fronts
▶ 1:32:47and again remind us of the what's the alternative to the differential privacy scheme? Well, there can be a lot of these. Ipums has a really good analysis uh that on how to address this. Past practices have used swapping, limited swapping. I think one solution is just turn off characteristic data until you get to a statistically significant level. Numerical data available, but turn off all the characteristic data until you're up at like the census track or county level.
▶ 1:33:14And that way, it's really hard to reverse engineer the algorithm at with population numbers that strong.
▶ 1:33:19Makes perfect sense. Thank you so much. I yield back. Uh I thank gentlemen. Uh I will now uh represent uh the gentle lady from
▶ 1:33:31Thank you Mr. Chair and thank you to the witnesses. I appreciate your time. This is a hearing about the census. So essentially a hearing about counting people or put another way determining who counts and who doesn't. And President Trump has made clear that he feels that birthright citizenship is not constitutional. He feels that non-citizens should not be counted in the census. He has made clear that he views the 2020 census as illegitimate. But the truth is the president can feel any way he wants.
▶ 1:34:00The courts have spoken. Birthright citizenship is the law of the land. The census counts for everyone. And the 2020 census was as accurate as the 2010 census. And yet here we are again in a hearing to make these claims, these nonsensical legal more legitimate by holding hearings about them. And more broadly, I think this hearing props up baseless legal theories that undermine the census and threaten our representative democracy.
▶ 1:34:30And I want to associate myself with the remarks of my Democratic colleagues. Uh but I'd like to take my time to go in a little bit different direction here. Um, I want to spend my time getting to the heart of this question of who counts and who doesn't count in the eyes of this administration. Who is seen as a real American and who is not? An investigative report by ProPublica has found that more than 170 American citizens have been detained by immigration agents. They've been dragged. They've been kicked.
▶ 1:35:00They have been detained for days at a time. These are US citizens. They are our fellow Americans. And yet, top Trump administration officials keep denying that US citizens have been arrested or detained at all in the immigration raids that are taking place across this country. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Christine Gnome has repeatedly falsely claimed that no American citizens have been arrested or detained. So, there are two reasons that we have that she could be doing this.
▶ 1:35:31One is that she is blatantly lying to the press. That is one option. Another is that she doesn't know what is happening under her own leadership. Either option is deeply disturbing to me. We have so much evidence that what Gnome has been saying about this is untrue. Many news outlets have confirmed these arrests and have spoken directly to US citizens who have been arrested or detained by immigration agents.
▶ 1:35:56They have gathered these disturbing stories about how our own citizens are being treated by this administration. We have the evidence. There's the case of American citizen George Rees, an Army veteran who was pulled out of his car by federal agents who were raiding a farm north of Los Angeles. In his words, "They sat me down on the dirt with my hands zip dyed behind my back. I told them I was a citizen. I told them I had ID. They didn't care.
▶ 1:36:23They never asked me for it." This US citizen was held for three days before finally being released. He was never charged with a crime and he's just one of many US citizens that we can document who have been detained or arrested. Again, we have the proof and yet Secretary Gnome continues to spread false information. Then there's the case of Jason Brian Brian Gvidia.
▶ 1:36:48Jason is a US citizen who worked at a tow truck yard when Border Patrol agents stormed in. Jason was handcuffed as he pleaded with the agents. He said, ' Let me show you my ID. Let me prove my status. He said they didn't care. All they cared about was the fact that I was brown and that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that's not right. We're in America. That's not right.
▶ 1:37:12The point is that the only people who seem to count as Americans to this administration are the people who look American. And any of us sitting here in this room, regardless of party, would be shocked, would be outraged, would express righteous indignation if we were detained based on our physical appearance or on our profile alone.
▶ 1:37:36Regardless of what we believe about this president, I would hope that we would agree. We would howl at our due process rights being denied.
▶ 1:37:46Would the gentle lady yield for a quick question? What does it mean to look like an American in 2025?
▶ 1:37:51Yes. Thank you very much. It seems clear to me that looking like American is somebody who does not have brown or black skin and sounding like American is someone who does not have an accent. That seems like that that's been established. And I just want to end with this. There is nothing more important than a person's liberty. Nothing. And I would hope that we could all agree on that.
▶ 1:38:16And we should all be standing up to our government when it is arresting and detaining citizens illegally and then lying about it. Citizenship in this country is not based on the color of your skin. It is not based on the accent that you have. And based on the actions of this administration, I'm not confident that it believes this. And I find this deeply chilling. Before I yield back, I have several uh unanimous consents that I would like to enter into the record.
▶ 1:38:46first being uh ProPublica. Immigration agents have held more than 170 Americans against their will. NPR fact checks Christine Gnome on ICE detaining US citizens. And an article um in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, citizenship question effects on household survey responses.
▶ 1:39:10and also uh an October 2015 report by the Congressional Research Service entitled aortioning seats in the US House of Representatives using the 2013 estimated population concluding that excluding non-citizens for aortionment aortionment purposes likely requires a constitutional amendment. I yield back.
▶ 1:39:30Without objection, those four will be entered into the record. I will now recognize the chairman of the judiciary committee, Mr. Jordan.
▶ 1:39:36Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Mayfeld. Uh, we've asked it before, haven't we? We've asked the citizenship question on the census before, haven't we?
▶ 1:39:45That's correct, Congressman. Uh,
▶ 1:39:47from 1820 to 1950, we asked that question. That's 130 years. From 1970 to 2000, another 30 years. So, 150 years, we asked the question.
▶ 1:39:58That's correct.
▶ 1:39:58And the previous speaker just said, if we ask the citizenship question, it's going to threaten democracy. Well, it didn't hurt democracy for 150 years. In fact, I I would bet I would bet if you I'll use my I'll use our district. You go to Ben, Ohio, our hometown. I bet if I went to Ben, Ohio, I walk to the post office or walk anywhere, any store, walk in, I see someone I know. Mr. Smith, do you think on the census, you know what the census is? Of course. Oh, sure. Every 10, every so often we get we find out how many we count the number of people in the country.
▶ 1:40:28I said, Mr. Smith, do you think when we're counting the number of people in this country, it's appropriate to find out how many are citizens? What do you think he would say? What do you think the average person would say?
▶ 1:40:39I suspect the answer would be yes, sir.
▶ 1:40:41It would not only be yes, they'd say, "Well, aren't you already doing that? That's pretty stupid." If you're not, that's where the American people are. The everyone's forounting it. We did it for 150 years of our 250 years as a country or since we declared independence. 249 almost 250 years now. We've done it for most of our history. Everyone thinks we're doing it. Everyone thinks we should do it except Democrats in Congress. It was interesting too in Mr. Yang's testimony.
▶ 1:41:11He said, "Oh, if we ask the question, we'll get inaccurate counts." And then he went on for the rest of his five minutes and talked about all the inaccuracies in the recent censuses where we're not asking it. Underounts, overounts, rural America, Hispanic Americans went pointed out all the problems and we're not asking the question. But somehow if we ask it, oh, it might get worse because we have some study. He even said like people thought it might be on the on the census questionnaire and it wasn't. And that hurt the count, which makes no sense to me. It wasn't on the it wasn't a question.
▶ 1:41:41So I I think this is so darn simple. Count the persons. That's what the Constitution says. Count the number of people and while you're doing that, find out how many are citizens. What's wrong with that? might actually help policymakers when we're determining policy if we know those two numbers. That's all we need to focus on. And I'll I'll go to Mr. Miller if he's got any comments about what I commented on the last [clears throat] part. I absolutely agree.
▶ 1:42:07And so, uh it's it's there is some question on who to count. I think that this if you get into it technically, the answer is you can count everyone. You just need to know certain population numerical data and then uh residency status because that could bleed into policy questions later. And I think that that's an important uh distinction to know that you can use different data sets within the totality of that data for different purposes.
▶ 1:42:31Of course, and that's that's useful information for policy makers. That's why we do it that way. I I mean, I get that. Let me ask you this question, Mr. Miller. Do you think uh finding out asking a citizenship question on the census is any way a threat to democracy?
▶ 1:42:44I do not. I think it's constitutionally mandated. If you
▶ 1:42:46Mr. Rodriguez, do you think constitutional scholar here, do you think that's somehow a threat to democracy if we ask how many people are here and how many citizens are here?
▶ 1:42:54No, it's entirely consistent with
▶ 1:42:57Mr. Mayfield, do you think that's a threat to democracy?
▶ 1:42:59The census has no effect on democracy,
▶ 1:43:02Exactly. Mr. Yang, do you think asking a citizenship question, while you say it might impact the accuracy, I don't know that I agree with that. I frankly disagree. Do you think that might threaten democracy in some some manner?
▶ 1:43:15It's a threat to accuracy, which means it would be a threat to how we allocate funds in the United States. And
▶ 1:43:19that's not what I asked you. I said, do you think it's a threat to democracy? Because that's what my Democrat colleague said just four minutes ago.
▶ 1:43:24How people are being represented and the funding that they get would be a threat?
▶ 1:43:29You think asking a citizenship so the Democrat witness thinks asking a citizenship question on the census is a threat to democracy. You think that's
▶ 1:43:37As currently constituted, it could be.
▶ 1:43:38Well, that's amazing. That's amazing. Finding out the number of people and the number of citizens in our country is somehow a threat to democracy. That's what the Democrat witness said in a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on the on the Constitution said. That is amazing. Uh Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
▶ 1:43:56I thank the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Um I will now represent the gentle lady from California.
▶ 1:44:02Thank you, Mr. Chair. Uh and apologies if this question has already been asked. Um, [clears throat] but I like to hear things with my own ears. Um, so Mr. Yang, can you what is the census sort of used for? What's why do we conduct this
▶ 1:44:22ownorous process?
▶ 1:44:24The principle used for the census is twofold. One is for the aortionment of of Congress, aortionment of seats in Congress, and the second is to get an accurate count of the population. So when we're distributing funds, whether it's 2.2 2 trillion in federal funds or state and local funds that we're distributing in the right way. What that means literally is where roads are built, where ski schools are built, you know, what services are needed in different communities for businesses. What that means is what stores get built and what what you stock in those shelves of those stores. Uh I live in Fairfax County.
▶ 1:44:55The fact that our Costco has approximately seven different ter seven different types of rice is a reflection of the fact that Fairfax County is about 20% Asian-American. Thank you for that. So, you know, uh I would agree with that, right? Someone who lives in, you know, a city, a county, a state, we're always fighting to get the resources that we need.
▶ 1:45:17And it's important to know how many people, regardless of where they come from, and regardless of who they are, what they look like, right? What language they speak, what rice they like. It's important to know how many people are in a place so you know how many hospitals to have, how many schools to have, how many parks to have. Am am I missing something here?
▶ 1:45:41No, it it is as very basic as that. And again, the point is to get an accurate count. One of the things that we've been talking about here is sort of how what affects accuracy. And we've talked specifically about Texas and Florida as some as being inaccurate counts. Well, I would point out that in the case of Florida, the federal the state government only allocated $300,000 to the the count for the entire state compared to the state of Alabama, much smaller state, which allocated $1.2 million to the count of their of their residents.
▶ 1:46:10So, how you do do your get out the count operations will translate into how accurate the roads will be. There is a correlation there. And I I do understand that it it seems like my Republican colleagues want to get rid of every single foreignb born person um you know in this country as though it boggles the mind because
▶ 1:46:29I I would object. Um I think that that is attacking the I I think that that is individuals. I think that that is attacking individual.
▶ 1:46:39Mr. Chairman, could you restore the order if you um does the gentle
▶ 1:46:42I made an opinion. I can have an
▶ 1:46:44Is the gentle lady asking to strike?
▶ 1:46:46I am. I'm asking to strike those words accusing us of that level of racism.
▶ 1:46:50I'm It's not racist if you think it. I mean, it's my opinion. I think I have right to an opinion.
▶ 1:46:55We'll suspend for one second.
▶ 1:47:01Well, the gentle lady uh expressed the specific words you're asking to be
▶ 1:47:04specifically what she stated was that the people on the other side wanted all foreign people to be removed from the country. And that's absolutely,
▶ 1:47:10as I mentioned, Mr. Chair, that is an attack on every side of the aisle. I am tired of of the allegations of racism.
▶ 1:47:18Mr. Chairman, that's not suspend.
▶ 1:47:20I didn't use race at all.
▶ 1:47:22Let me suspend for one moment.
▶ 1:47:24Mr. Chairman, if I could that's not engaging in personalities. It's not an ad hominemum attack that she disagrees. She can she can use her own time to explain why she disagrees.
▶ 1:47:32Everyone suspend for one moment. Gentle lady from Wyoming, are you withdrawing the request to strike the the words from the just want to point out
▶ 1:48:02the allegations are absolutely uh unsubstantiated and it is uh Mr.
▶ 1:48:07Chairman, could you instruct her to point it out on her own time? and reclaiming the time for the gentle lady from California. Please, please proceed. We'll we'll restore the clock.
▶ 1:48:16Thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess I'll I don't want to use my own time saying, but I guess now perspectives and opinions are no longer um important here in this committee. That seems like it would be a shame. Mr. Mr. Yang, we were talking about the census and and the question is it kind of doesn't matter where you come from, if you're someplace, if you're using resources, it would be important for that jurisdiction, for that municipality to know that you are there.
▶ 1:48:45I mean, where I come from, um, if you get sick, you should go to the hospital and the hospital's not supposed to say, "Well, who are you? Let me see all of your paperwork." I think the doctors take a hypocratic oath to help anyone who's coming in bleeding who would be wanting to need or use the resources that are available to them in that hospital. Do you understand sort of the question that I'm asking about why it's important just to know who is in a particular place?
▶ 1:49:16That that's absolutely right with respect to public services with respect to roads that immigration status does not matter when it comes to the need for good roads the need for good public services and the making sure we have an accurate count of our entire population and again if you even go to Supreme Court president in Ewell they recognize that you should be doing doing total population counts whole population counts for purpose of aortionment.
▶ 1:49:42The history on this has been very clear that the census is designed to count the entire population.
▶ 1:49:48Thank you for that. You know, as I look in all my questions, not one word in any of these questions is the word race. Uh but so, Mr. Yang, Assistant Attorney General Rodriguez says in his written testimony that aortionment should not account for those in a state unlawfully. What would be your response to that?
▶ 1:50:07Well, I don't see anything in the Constitution that that makes any sort of distinction. Rather what the 14th amendment provides in the census in terms of aortionment in article 1 section two with respect to census is the counting of whole persons and it makes no distinction. Now in the written testimony it makes reference to the fact that somehow they should be part of a political community. But the the notion of political community does not exist anywhere in the text of the constitution the 14th amendment or the aortionment act.
▶ 1:50:35And certainly even the contemporary dictionaries that he cited except for a reference to parish law did not make any reference to being part of a political community. Rather simply a resident is somewhere that has a a normal place of do uh doicile. Now to be clear there are rules that the census has with respect to people that are transient with respect to people that are to have tourist visas for example should not be counted in the census. There are residency rules with respect to the census as to what is considered a
▶ 1:51:04So you mentioned uh whole person in uh the constitutional framers use the phrase whole number of persons rather than citizen or voter. And why do you think they did that? Because of course when you say whole person and of course I think and this time I'm going to use race. But I'm going to talk about myself. There used to be a time when black person was not even considered a whole person. It was like three-fifths of a person.
▶ 1:51:32So I'm getting a little triggered by that phrase. Can you explain sort of why the framers used that phrase?
▶ 1:51:38You are correct. Uh representative. Unfortunately, when the constitution was first adopted, slaves were not considered citizens, but were and for purpose of the census was considered three-fifths of a person as a distinguished from a so-called whole person. And it wasn't until the 14th amendment that citizenship was given given to slaves, any anyone born of slaves, and that that sort of in making clear that when we are counting, we are still counting all persons uh in in the state.
▶ 1:52:06So tell me again, can you reiterate for the folks that can't seem to maybe hear what you're saying about why it's important to have an accurate count when you were doing the census?
▶ 1:52:16Well, having an accurate count for purposes of data allows us to make sure that we have the services that we need in the United States for everyone. We need a society that has infrastructure for everyone. It is true for immigrants, non-immigrants alike. Certainly there can be policy debates around different aspects of that but at least having the set accurate data that all of us can work from is critical to how this nation
▶ 1:52:41Thank you m uh thank you Mr. Yang and Mr. Chair I yield back.
▶ 1:52:43Thank gentle lady from California. I would now recognize the gentle lady from
▶ 1:52:48Well first of all I disagree with the idea that the constit that there's a constitutional requirement for a conducting a census so that we can have different varieties of rice at Costco. I almost want to say that almost all countries conducted
▶ 1:53:05Mr. Chair that's racist.
▶ 1:53:10Does the gentle lady have a
▶ 1:53:18gentle lady from Wyoming have a
▶ 1:53:22Rice or hamburger or any other food stuff. That isn't why we conduct a M Mr. Chairman, those were those words as ill- advised and foolish as they were were probably not uh engaging in personalities. So I think we can let that go and call it even after Mr.
▶ 1:53:42I was using the terminology that Mr. Yang used if you weren't listening.
▶ 1:53:46I was listening but I was also getting your vibe.
▶ 1:53:49Almost the gentle the gentle lady from Wyoming will proceed.
▶ 1:53:53You should proceed. Almost all countries that conduct a consensus uh actually have a citizenship question and the UN says that it is a best practice to include a citizenship question on these censuses. Countries that ask about citizenship are Canada, Australia, Ireland, Germany, and Mexico. The source of this is the New York Times. Uh Mr. Mayfield.
▶ 1:54:20I'd like to focus on the Census Bureau's decision to utilize the differential privacy methodology for the first time in the 2020 census. I am incredibly concerned that intentionally creating structural inaccuracy in census data collection at the lowest unit has impacted the reliability of nationwide census counts, congressional reaportionment, assignment of presidential electors, redistricting, and federal funding allocations.
▶ 1:54:48In light of these concerns, could you briefly explain the steps that the Census Bureau took when adopting and implementing this differential privacy within the 2020 census?
▶ 1:55:01To put it in shorthand, Congresswoman, this was done at the civil servant level uh without any legal opinion being obtained. The decision was made uh by John Aboud who is the uh director of privacy and statistics and a small group of people working with him.
▶ 1:55:19There was actually opposition from some parts other parts of the bureau because uh the test repeatedly demonstrated that it would falsify data including the the block level that you mentioned but anything below the state level. uh they proceeded with that because they wanted to do differential privacy not because there was any need for differential privacy.
▶ 1:55:42Uh data swapping which was the method used in the previous three census had always been adequate and to this day there is still no problem with it. There's a 2023 study by researchers from Harvard, NYU and Columbia that finds that data swapping is just as good as differential privacy but it doesn't alter the data. There was no reason to do this. Now, to give you an example of just how bad it is, again, this is post use of differential privacy.
▶ 1:56:08That study found that the use of differential privacy, for instance, if you had three Hispanics on one block, could create a variance anywhere in the state of zero Hispanics or six Hispanics. In other words, a 100% difference either way. All of the data, as Mr. Miller alluded, below the state level has been subjected to differential privacy because of the way the algorithm works. It's a top- down algorithm. None of the data can be released in unaltered form.
▶ 1:56:35You cannot actually get the results of the survey below the state level. So you may know there are 9 million people in Indiana, but you don't know how many people there are in Muny. You don't know how many people there are on Mayfield Street in
▶ 1:56:46They cooked the books and they did so intentionally. Is that a good way of describing it?
▶ 1:56:51That is accurate.
▶ 1:56:52All right. So they didn't follow the Administrative Procedures Act. They didn't put this out for notice and comment. They didn't solicit information from people from statistitians or economists or even states or local governments about how best to do the census of counting their people as to do as Mr. Yang says, which is to know how many people live in our country. They didn't do any of that.
▶ 1:57:15It's even worse than that. Congressman, Congresswoman, excuse me. Uh they didn't do no comment. There's a debate about whether or not that's required, but there are numerous committees to allude to something that Congresswoman Scanland mentioned in her opening statement in which the census interacts with consumers of census data and partners, including state and local governments, including interest groups. Every single statistical group objected to this by letter. Every single state, the National Commerce of Legislators objected. Maine objected. It's a blue state. Utah objected, a red state.
▶ 1:57:45The city of Alexandria, just across the water here, very blue, objected. Maricopa County, very red, objected. The House Progressive Caucus, they were right. They objected. The Mexican-American Legal Fund, they objected. The Native American Tribes objected. Everyone knew, it was well known that this would not work. And the census civil servants, a small group of them, went ahead with it because they wanted to do it, not because there was any need and disregarding the fact that it made the census inaccurate at the enumeration stage.
▶ 1:58:14They did it because they wanted to cook the books and they wanted to manipulate the data to have the outcome that we actually had which is overounting people in six blue states or liberal states uh and giving them additional members in the House of Representatives. Is that fair?
▶ 1:58:31If I might respectfully disagree with that part, I believe it was done out of professional pride because there was an obsession with using differential privacy. Several other speakers have alluded to the use of internet data and supercomputers which is what J John Abad mentioned. Congress has does not exclude the use of outside data. If anyone here wants to grab census data and buy something from the internet or buy a credit card company's data and combine them, that creates no violation. There is no problem with doing that.
▶ 1:58:59Section 9 of title 13 bars only the disclosure of personal data. In other words, your census form that you filled out for your The errors that have been attributed with respect to the number of people are based on post- enumeration surveys. In other words, the census does quality checks after the census. But those are models. They are not themselves enumerations and they are no good or no better than the models and the data that's put in them. There are errors after every census that are believed.
▶ 1:59:26So what you do is you use that data to try to focus your next census and all your other data collections to make sure that you don't miss other people, that you don't overount them. So, it may be an educated guess that some states received more people and some states received fewer, but it is a guess and it is certainly no better than the modeling that the people in the bureau did.
▶ 1:59:49Okay. And I know that I am out of time. What I'm hope comes out of this hearing, however, is that we have solutions of what Congress can do to make sure that these inaccuracies are addressed and that we never have this kind of a mess a again. And I also would ask unanimous consent to submit into the record what you need to know about the citizenship question in the census uh July 2nd, 2019 by the New York Times.
▶ 2:00:14Without objection, I'll be entered in the record. I thank the gentle lady from Wyoming. And I now recognize the ranking member, Miss Campbell.
▶ 2:00:19Thank you, Mr. Mr. Chairman, um, thank you all of our witnesses because I think there's a lot to dig into here. It's been a really, [cough] excuse me, interesting discussion. Um, I guess a couple points of clarification, Mr. Yang. Do you think there's general agreement that the purpose of the census clause is to get an accurate count of all persons?
▶ 2:00:47Certainly, that has been the history. uh it has been nonpartisan that it is the purpose of the census as defined in the constitution defined in 14 and then the 14th amendment for personortionment is to count all persons that is a literal
▶ 2:01:00and they there we have considerable constitutional history and court opinions saying they did not choose to say inhabitants they did not choose to say taxpayers they did not choose to say citizens or voters it's persons
▶ 2:01:15that is correct and this came up in the context of a Supreme Court case called Well, where an argument was made that aortionment should be based solely on legal voters. The court the Supreme Court in that case rejected that approach and said that we should be using total population total population whole population for purposes of
▶ 2:01:34And that case was in 2016. So it was only 10 years ago, five, nine years ago.
▶ 2:01:38So of course there's been a lot of discussion about what questions should be on the census or or not be on the census. And I heard my uh colleague across the aisle talk about uh it being a good thing to put a citizenship question on on the census. Um although I think context is important um when we're talking about Canada or Ireland or some of the other states uh nation states that were mentioned, they certainly do not have administrations that are actively engaged in hostility towards immigrants.
▶ 2:02:08So I think that's an important distinction. But when you were testifying, you talked about the two biggest things that undermined accuracy in the in the census. And one was privacy concerns and anti-government sentiment. And the second was a lack of robust get out the census, get out the count um efforts. I certainly participate in count efforts in in my home state.
▶ 2:02:34Um with respect to the privacy and anti-government concerns, I wish Mr. Massie were here because I know it's a big interest of his. Um, but in an era where we've got Doge kind of trolling through everyone's social security and snap records and voting records and everything, can you talk a little bit about how those privacy concerns might be heightened right now?
▶ 2:02:57Well, this goes to Thank you for that question. I think this goes to the decreasing trust that Americans have in America uh in US government which is unfortunate but that is the case and that is because of whether we want to talk about Doge or the represent represent Bellan talked about immigration enforcement certainly that also breeds distrust within certain pockets of our community whether it's the Hispanic community the Asian community so when we're trying to determine an accurate sentence all census all
▶ 2:03:27of that context matters and simply citing the history of how the census has been used in the past when there might have been more trust in the government is different than what we are looking at today.
▶ 2:03:36Yeah. And I certainly hear from my constituents that they're very very concerned about these efforts to troll all of the federal data and certainly the census would provide another opportunity to do that. We also have in your testimony on page five um information about which groups were overcounted or undercounted in the 2020 census.
▶ 2:03:59And I would note that non-Hispanic whites were overcounted, but there were some pretty serious undercounts as you've mentioned before among um Hispanic or Latino, blacks, children, etc. So it does seem important that we try to um have more robust counting in those areas.
▶ 2:04:19That's correct. And to be clear, overall the census was accurate.
▶ 2:04:25Uh when compared to the 2010 and 2000 census, they were within they were all considered statistically insignificant with respect to o overount or undercount. Certainly when when you compare it to the 1990 1980 census, we did much better. That said, we recognize that there are overcounts and undercounts. We all I think we all agree we should continue to work on figuring that out and how best to do that. Certainly for my community, the Asian community, part of this is outreach. Part of it is part of is also language barriers that people face.
▶ 2:04:55Part of it is distrust of the government. So making sure we address all of these barriers for rural communities, it's internet access, especially in this no age now where the census can be conducted by the internet. So we should be thinking about those barriers to make sure how we get an accurate count. Last thing I might add quickly is that also I would ask members of Congress to fully fund the Census Bureau.
▶ 2:05:15The the budget right now I think the request is around two billion by by our community or 1.8 billion. Right now I think the funding is at 1.35 billion if we want to address a lot of these technical issues as well as to figure out how to do it right to get an accurate count. Robust funding is
▶ 2:05:30Yeah. And the last question I had was with respect to some attempt to conflate the undercounting which was admitted of certain Republicanled states, conflating that with some kind of political animus as opposed to it being underounting relating to these already marginalized populations.
▶ 2:05:47Is there anything uh that you've seen to indicate that it was based on political motivation as opposed to those uh states just having uh marginalized populations which have been underounted across the board?
▶ 2:06:00Yeah, thank you for that question. We have the honor of working with the Census Bureau. They're dedicated civil servants. They're trying to get this right. They they recognize that they did make mistakes and there were certain undercounts and overounts. The reason is complex like we've talked about. Part of it is distrust. Part of it is underinvestment by certain communities in making that count happen.
▶ 2:06:20So when you look at it in this aggregate, especially when you look at where the overcounts underounts occurred, it's not fair to say that it only occurred in red states or only occurred in blue states. It occurred in a lot of different states, but it also was overall pretty accurate. So we should kind of think about all of these in that context before making any snap judgments. Well, I appreciate the chairman calling this so we can work on continual improvement of the process. Thank you.
▶ 2:06:49I thank the ranking member um and I will now represent the gentleman from
▶ 2:06:54Thank you for being easygoing on uh five minutes. That's what I do too. Okay. Uh first of all, Mr. Yang, I just got to interject myself in here on something that you said that was I thought offensive. Um, there is a three-fifths clause in our original constitution that was the result of a compromise. I suppose it could have been 100%.
▶ 2:07:18But the reason it wasn't 100% is the freedom loving people did not want to give the slave states too much power in Congress. Okay. You imply that the reason it wasn't 100% um was because uh people were trying to um say black people were less than white people. That wasn't the point at all. You understand?
▶ 2:07:46The point is that that the free states, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, those states did not want to give too much power to the slave states. So it was not done to punish slaves. It was done to looking down the road. eventually had a civil war anyway. But it was looking down the road to make sure that um the slave states did not have too much power.
▶ 2:08:16Okay, you understand that? I hope you understand that. But you just explain the three-fifths thing in a way to um make America look worse in the eyes of the young people. So do not appreciate that. Now, question for Mr. Miller. Uh, has the has the census ever,
▶ 2:08:38Mr. Chairman, could I just a quick point of order, but would it be possible for me after the gentleman speaks to just respond to that just because of the profoundity in the depth of the statement he just made? I think uh
▶ 2:08:51it's a gentle it's a gentleman from Wisconsin's time
▶ 2:08:53and I don't mean it exactly. I don't want to dract from his time. I'm wondering if we maybe we could go for a second round just to uh explicate that.
▶ 2:09:00You and I can talk offline. We'll let the gentleman from Wisconsin.
▶ 2:09:02Okay. Very good. Thank you.
▶ 2:09:03Okay. Uh Mr. Miller, has the census ever included a citizenship question?
▶ 2:09:09Yes, historically has included the citizenship question.
▶ 2:09:12Okay. Um, why was it removed?
▶ 2:09:16That's speculative. Uh, I I think that there were motives for that. Uh, you know, states would be motivated by it if they get more money from the federal government. There's partisan reasons why you would want to do it. There's a lot of reasons and it's probably fairly
▶ 2:09:30Who was the president at the time it was removed? I know.
▶ 2:09:33Oh man, the last one was 50 is what we said. 1950. So
▶ 2:09:39Truman. Okay, assuming you're right. Uh, has the Supreme Court ever held that it's illegal to include this question?
▶ 2:09:47No, I don't believe the Supreme Court has ever weighed in to say that you cannot ask the citizenship question.
▶ 2:09:52Could President Trump and Commerce Secretary Letic add a citizenship question to the 2030 census?
▶ 2:10:00Okay. Um, could you give me some benefits? I mean, I I'm shocked that it's not on there already, but do you want to speculate on some benefits we'd get if we added such a question? Uh, well, I mean, it would impact, especially if you got rid of differential privacy, you could know uh how to allocate federal funding formulas more accurately to uh make sure that it's going to citizen or lawful permanent resident uh populations that legally qualify for them.
▶ 2:10:27If you want to have this impact uh redistricting and you and you want to argue uh on a constitutional basis that political districts should only represent citizens or citizens and lawful permanent residents uh that you would need to know that data and that would have a massive impact on uh how political maps are made and who is in Congress.
▶ 2:10:45Couldn't we also assume that people who are not here legally probably aren't going to be hanging around that much
▶ 2:10:51Uh I mean I don't know. I mean a lot of them have been here for a long time. some of them are seasonal workers and leave after a couple years. Uh so it's it's hard for me to answer that precisely with such a large population.
▶ 2:11:02I Okay, not across the board, but wouldn't wouldn't one expect that if some people were here illegally or on a temporary visa that they weren't going to be here for the whole 10 years or maybe even
▶ 2:11:13That's correct. There's a lot of movement of that that population both into and out of the United States of
▶ 2:11:19Okay. Could you explain the uh differential privacy uh controversy? I'll put it.
▶ 2:11:26Yeah. So, basically, you know, you have data and there's been previous methods of keeping that uh uh uh basically uh recognizing data privacy laws. And so, there was different methods of protecting privacy. And this is a new method, but it's highly flawed because it scramles all of the data. It literally deconstructs an entire person, reconstructs them in the aggregate all over the place. There's arguments it will disproportionately help urban areas. There's arguments it'll disproportionately hurt rural areas.
▶ 2:11:56Uh there's racial uh uh issues here, but basically it's fake data below the state level. And it's really hard to create political districts that are accurate and representative of uh the the voting population, especially when you don't have accurate numerical uh population data at a granular semi-granular level.
▶ 2:12:17Would you support returning to what what call swapping for the 2030 census?
▶ 2:12:22I think there's several other proposals. That is one uh combined with the ability to turn off characteristic data until you're at statistically significant levels. There's other methods that are and and strategies that are multi-tered that are uh mentioned by entities like IPAMS that I think would work. So essentially, yes.
▶ 2:12:42Okay. Thank you.
▶ 2:12:43Would the gentleman
▶ 2:12:44I think the gentleman from Wisconsin would regarding
▶ 2:12:49Well, but I was just wondering if I just wanted the opportunity to respond to Mr. Growthman's intervention.
▶ 2:12:54It's gentleman's time, but out of courtesy to the ranking member, I'll get a gentleman like 30 seconds.
▶ 2:12:58Okay. I I just want to say that the analysis he advanced is historically obtuse and morally disoriented. The the slave states took the position that the enslaved Africanameans should count 100% for the purposes of reaportionment, but for those purposes only. They didn't have any civil rights. They didn't have any voting rights. They couldn't run for office. They had no civil liberties. They were property. The northern states said they should not count at all. Reclaiming our time count zero.
▶ 2:13:27And they arrived at the three-fifths. Reclaiming the time, Mr. We're we're going to have a history lesson here. The gentleman from
▶ 2:13:35was making a point with respect to the off to use three-fifths um reference.
▶ 2:13:40I was trying to explain what the historical genesis of it is
▶ 2:13:43and the and the history of it. the gentleman from Wisconsin characterized it from his perspective and I think is it was important for me to put that on the record and I think it's been asked and answered and we don't need to have a history lesson on it. So I'm going to go ahead and proceed uh with my questions. this hearing I think has been illuminating on a number of different levels and I would like to ask just sort of a simple question for for the panel generally which is very specifically was the 2020 census accurate?
▶ 2:14:13Mr. Mr.
▶ 2:14:16at the state and national level, it was within the margin of error for modern censuses. Below the state level, it was
▶ 2:14:25Mr. Rodriguez,
▶ 2:14:27considering that it counted illegal and non-immigrant aliens, uh, it was inaccurate according to the dictates of the constitution.
▶ 2:14:34Mr. Miller is the most inaccurate census in in modern times in my opinion.
▶ 2:14:39Mr. gang
▶ 2:14:40at the state and national levels it was accurate. At the sub levels below that it was inconsistent at times but overall still did very well.
▶ 2:14:47And so was it true that in 2022 that the Census Bureau itself uh acknowledged that there were significant errors and significant discrepancies? Is that correct Mr. Mayfield?
▶ 2:14:59That is correct.
▶ 2:14:59Right. And did it have significant impact on states and that there were underounting and overounting of at least 14 states? Mr. Mayfield.
▶ 2:15:08That is the census position as of 2022.
▶ 2:15:11Now, was it also accurate that in fact the underounting was often directed towards more conservative states with more Republican representation and the overounting was directed towards what we might call blue states with more Democrat representation.
▶ 2:15:27I can't address your use of the word direction. That is certainly what the modeling suggests was the result.
▶ 2:15:33Mr. Miller, would you add to that? Yeah, the census would uh bureau would acknowledge that that would have been the outcome
▶ 2:15:40and to the tune of as many as 500,000 in the state of Texas for example.
▶ 2:15:46That's correct. Costing Texas an additional congressional seat.
▶ 2:15:50So let's get to the heart then of why like why is that the case? We've posited here in this hearing and I've heard a number of folks represent that one of the reasons is because of illegal immigrants. So true or false is a legal is the issue of how we count involving illegal immigrants having a direct impact on representation in Congress. Mr. Mayfield,
▶ 2:16:13that is undeniably true.
▶ 2:16:15Mr. Rodriguez,
▶ 2:16:16I agree and it's been true for at least the last three censuses.
▶ 2:16:19Mr. Miller,
▶ 2:16:20it's a mathematical certainty.
▶ 2:16:22Mr. Yang,
▶ 2:16:22undocumented immigrants are required to be counted under the Constitution.
▶ 2:16:25Do they have a direct impact on how we aortion and how districts are getting set up?
▶ 2:16:30That is less clear to me. Let me ask you a question, Mr. Yang. You posited earlier some, you know, theories about, you know, how we count people and that we should count everybody for aortionment purposes. If a, if 75 million people were to come into the state of California between now and 2030, should we have a 100 new congressional seats in California if all 75 million of those people were illegally present in the state of California? That's the way the constitution is currently constructed as I understand it.
▶ 2:16:57So, so that's how and and taking issue with that by the way that that that the Constitution requires that we aortion based on people who are here illegally, which I which a number of the other people on the panel have questioned and which at no point has the Supreme Court said that that is the case. Then we're saying here that I'm just going to say the Democrat witness is saying that if we had 75 million people illegally flood into the state of California, we must have 100 representatives again rounding the math there uh added to the state of California. That is extraordinary to me.
▶ 2:17:27But I do want to I do want to follow up and finish on on this question of the uh uh differential privacy. The other question that has been raised here which is highly problematic on a less partisan basis is the extent to which we have the Census Bureau adopting by by Mr.
▶ 2:17:42Mayfield's testimony by edict of a civil servant bureaucrat at the Census Bureau, a uh approach to estimating and guessing the uh the uh based on something that was attacked by numerous groups, questioned by numerous groups, and is now proven to be statistically problematic that it is actually causing massive problems with respect to our counting. Is that fair, Mr. Mayfield?
▶ 2:18:12That is accurate.
▶ 2:18:13Mr. Rodriguez, is that is that is that
▶ 2:18:15That's fair.
▶ 2:18:16Mr. Miller,
▶ 2:18:18we may disagree on a lot of different things, but I think there's a bipartisan consensus that this is a problem, a big
▶ 2:18:24And Mr. Yang, you said something that's, you know, fine-tuning, but you also seem to acknowledge that there are significant problems with respect to the way this is being handled now
▶ 2:18:35as a new policy. I agree that this is something that needs to be evaluated. And so, Mr. Miller, I you've um thrown out a couple of ideas. I want to conclude on that point because I think it's really important that there are other ways to go about doing this. And we, you know, swapping, you get into that and and the issue here for everybody to understand is you have laws that say you got to protect privacy.
▶ 2:18:56You've got a massive file that is protected at unbelievable levels of of of uh security and and inability to look at the data. And so therefore, we've got to figure out how to know that we have an accurate census. And this differential privacy is raising massive concerns on a nonpartisan basis, right? A Harvard study, independent groups, groups on the left, groups on the right. It would seem to me that we should come to a consensus on how we should approach this.
▶ 2:19:25Could the gentleman uh finish, you know, filling in that uh question and that point?
▶ 2:19:29Absolutely. So uh at the end of the day there is a constitutional purpose for all of this and a privacy statute cannot be a reason by which to ignore the uh outgrowths and and and and outflows of of what the purpose of this data is.
▶ 2:19:46So if we have a privacy standard that is causing and I think most people would agree with this at this point that that is causing significant data distortion that is impacting all sorts of federal funding formulas all sorts of uh uh potentially uh uh definitely redistricting uh potentially depending on how uh uh if if we're if it's not everything that we believe it is and not everything that they're purporting to say it is uh in theory it's not supposed to affect aortionment. I don't have access to the data. I can't verify that. That's how it's supposed to work.
▶ 2:20:16But at the end of the day, we should defer to a privacy method that is also as good and uh does not create as many constitutional issues as we have seen. If that was not that is not uh achieved by swapping and turning off uh data, we need to get our smart people together and figure out another option. And
▶ 2:20:36you were suggesting closing out my time's over the of turning off the data. That was an approach you're suggesting to try to have an approach. I think Mr. Mr. Gan, can I just ask you on a nonpartisan basis with just a little indulgence, do you have a perspective on that? Cuz I saw you kind of nodding. It's sort of maybe almost in that kind of like intellectual chewing on it as to whether that would be an approach that might help solve the problem of managing privacy but not having data that's
▶ 2:21:00Like I said, I think this is worth evaluating and this is part of what happens after every census is the Census Bureau looks at what worked, what didn't. It acknowledges that mistakes are made. It acknowledges in this case that there are certain overcounts and underounts. That's no different than any other census. Now, the job of the Census Bureau as as with guidance from all of you is to how to move forward and make that system even better for the next
▶ 2:21:23All right. I think the panel I'm now know that my colleague from Texas seek unanimous consent. I mean, we've discussed the census after um review quite a bit. So, I'd like to seek unanimous consent to introduce the GAO report on the 2020 census coverage, errors, and challenges to inform the 2030 plans. I think there's been a lot of misstatements about what it shows. So, it good for everybody to have
▶ 2:21:48Without objection, we'll insert that into the record. And I'll now recognize the gentleman from Texas, Mr. H.
▶ 2:21:52Hey, Mr. Chairman. The time has come to elucidate the American people and a census manipulation that Democrats have been using to influence American elections for years. In 2018, Republican leadership, including the president himself, called for a citizenship question to be included in the 2020 census reports. To no one's surprise, when the Democrats took control, these requests went unanswered and the question of citizenship was waved.
▶ 2:22:21But the fact remains that the concept of sanctuary cities and radical blue states ignoring immigration law and using the illegal population to manipulate the lines of congressional districts is in fact unconstitutional. Not only are there severe constitutional concerns from the inclusion of illegal immigrants, but the Census Bureau admitted to having made several quote errors in their 2020 census report.
▶ 2:22:50Convenient, seeing that as in 2020, Donald Trump was on top of the ticket. In 2020, the bureau underounted in primarily deep red states such as Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas, all red, while overounting in and radical left blue states like Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island. This egregious error led to many states being denied proper representation in Congress and the Electoral College.
▶ 2:23:20So much so that these errors cost Republicans not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but six seats in the House. In addition to the 2020 miscounting, including illegal including illegal immigrants in the census has improperly granted radical left blue states 12 additional seats in the United States House of Representatives. That's a total of 18 seats gained.
▶ 2:23:48That is a huge problem and those are the facts. Mr. Mayfield, thank you so much for being here. Sir, I have a question for you if you don't mind. You sir are a seasoned litigator who has practiced in matters ranging from complex commercial litigation to constitutional and administrative law. In your expert opinion, and I want you to really speak about this in long form because I want this recorded. Should illegal aliens be included in the aortionment process under the 14th amendment?
▶ 2:24:19The Supreme Court has never directly addressed that, Congressman.
▶ 2:24:23Uh, for a portionate purposes, as Congress has interpreted it, the Supreme Court has held that it currently applies to all people regardless of citizenship. There is certainly an open question as to whether or not if Congress were to direct the Census Bureau to do it differently as to whether or not that would be legal.
▶ 2:24:43Okay. So in regards to thinking more of a high level in terms of being a citizen and what it means to be a citizen in this country and I do believe that being a citizen in this country means that you have the right to choose the leadership if you're a taxpaying legal citizen in this country. If you are an illegal person in this country should you under any circumstances be allowed to vote and choose leadership in this country?
▶ 2:25:12That wouldn't be an expert opinion that as a citizen I would object to that.
▶ 2:25:16And what about you, Miss Rodriguez?
▶ 2:25:18I also object to that,
▶ 2:25:19Mr. Miller.
▶ 2:25:21Correct. Citizens should not be illegal aliens should not be voting.
▶ 2:25:24And that applies to you also, Mr. I'd love to hear your response to this
▶ 2:25:27Not non-citizens are allowed not allowed to participate in federal elections.
▶ 2:25:32Okay. Are they but are they participating in federal elections?
▶ 2:25:36The studies have shown that there are very few instances when which they have. So that number needs to be zero. And as somebody who is who is a proud Texan, we we and in Florida have done our best to get that number to zero. And in in spite of the fact that I just voted a couple of weeks ago and we voted with paper ballots that we had to show an ID for that they didn't verified my address and where I lived and then I had to put said piece of paper through a machine, copied it. They gave me another copy and then they gave me my very proud I voted sticker.
▶ 2:26:06And even with those stringent rules with my daughter, my daughter who is seven years old was actually with me. She too got an I voted sticker. And guess what? With those stringent laws, we still have illegals voting in federal elections. So the question is not even about what's happening in Texas. If it's happening in Texas, you have to imagine that while it may seem like a minuscule amount to you, sir, that number needs to be zero.
▶ 2:26:29And if it's happening in Texas with those stringent rules, imagine what's h imagine what's happening in other blue states that don't have anything that closely resembles that level of redundancy to ensure that the person that voted in that election is in fact a citizen that has an address and has an ID. And with that, I'll yield back the remainder of my time. Thank you very much. Thank the gentleman from Texas. That concludes today's hearing. We thank the witnesses for appearing before the subcommittee today.
▶ 2:26:54Without objection, all members will have five legislative days to submit additional written questions for the witnesses or additional materials for the record. Without objection, the hearing is