The Trump administration’s proposed changes to the U.S. Census could blur details of Maryland’s population by diminishing the amount of demographic data collected.
The loss of data could impact the state’s representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. It could also undermine the understanding of who is living in Maryland and how funds are allocated for state and federal programs, experts say.
“We’re not gonna have a true pulse on what Maryland really is like,” Christina Getrich, a professor and director of graduate studies for the University of Maryland’s anthropology department, said.
The proposal, released by the U.S. Census Bureau earlier this month, requested the addition of a question regarding respondents’ legal status. It also seeks to remove questions about race, ethnicity and sexual orientation.
According to the proposal, these changes would prioritize its Constitutional mandate to count people in each state based on where a person lives most of the time and would prevent the census from becoming “distorted in any way by questions about immaterial personal characteristics, such as race.”
The White House referred questions to the U.S. Department of Commerce, which did not respond to Capital News Service’s request for comment.
A long history
The Constitution mandates the collection of an accurate count of the U.S. population. The government uses the data for various reasons, like apportioning U.S. House Representatives among states, distributing federal funds for state programs and drawing legislative districts.
“Multiple people use this data. It’s one of the most valuable data sets we have in the country,” Mariam Rashid, the associate director of racial equity and justice at the Center for American Progress, said.
Rashid emphasized the historical success of the census and the importance of counting every person in the country. The last time the census underwent major changes was with the ratification of the 14th Amendment, eradicating the Three-Fifths Compromise to count Black people as one whole person, she added.
“The census has not changed since 1790,” she said. “We’ve had the same accurate way of counting people, meaning we count every person in the United States.”
The Trump administration attempted to add a citizenship question to the census in 2019, but those efforts were ultimately unsuccessful as many states, including Maryland, blocked the changes with legal injunctions.
Larger impacts
Maryland has a diverse ethnic and racial makeup. According to 2024 census data, Maryland has an estimated population of 6.26 million residents. Of that population, 46.9% is white alone, 29.1% is Black or African American alone, 6.9% is Asian American alone, 9.2% is two or more races and 17.1% is foreign-born or immigrant.
The changes could compromise the Voting Rights Act, said Brenda Wright, a special counsel for litigation and policy for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
“The Voting Rights Act itself protects people from racial discrimination,” Wright said. “And in order to determine whether a community is entitled to that protection, you need to know what its racial demographics are.”
The proposal said that eliminating certain demographic questions could increase census response rates. This would lead to a more complete population count and a “fairer political representation.”
However, Getrich said that the opposite effect might be seen in Maryland.
She said that there are immigrants throughout the state, but that urban and suburban areas in the state tend to see a larger number of immigrants. Not counting them in the census could “invisibilize” them, she said.
Rashid is part of a multi-organizational task force that tracks potential changes to the census and provides feedback. She said the proposed changes “would have detrimental effects.”
Without accurate racial data, “funding would go to the wrong places” or could be cut completely, Rashid said.
“Schools wouldn’t have enough seats for incoming students, public safety decisions would not be based on accurate crime rates,” she said. “The wait times for healthcare, for example, or business decisions would not be made accurately. It would be made on faulty information.”
Rashid added that this administration’s treatment of documented and undocumented immigrants, paired with an often legal grey zone immigration status can fall under, could cause a lot of people to not respond to the proposed citizenship question for fear of retaliation or being detained.
“It’s really going back to that time in our country where we’re just erasing people,” Rashid said.