This week’s federal policy roundup covers data equity, immigration enforcement, civil rights, and voting rights. Key developments include a court blocking IRS disclosure of taxpayer information to ICE; the Education Department withholding gender-identity civil rights data; the Trump administration asking the Supreme Court to restore an expanded voter-verification system; and a Census Bureau proposal that could exclude millions of immigrants and eliminate race and ethnicity questions.
Census Bureau Proposes Excluding Millions of Immigrants and Eliminating Race and Ethnicity Questions
The Census Bureau issued a proposed rule September 10 that would radically change the next decennial U.S. Census in 2030 in two primary ways. First, it proposes to ask about immigration status in order to exclude everyone without citizenship or lawful permanent resident status from the 2030 census totals used to allocate House seats and Electoral College votes. This change has two main impacts. The first impact is that adding a citizenship question reduces participation from naturalized citizens, noncitizen immigrants, and mix-status households according to past Census Bureau data and the U.S. Supreme Court. The resulting undercount would produce incorrect data used for everything ranging from allocation of government funding to health research. For example, undercounting minority populations would mean that certain regions would lose their fair share of approximately $2.8 trillion dollars in annual federal allocations informed by census data, such as the number of school aged children. The second related impact is it would directly shift electoral power away from states and communities with larger immigrant and minority populations both because of the rule proposing not to count some immigrants and because of the undercount issue. Moreover, immigrant status data is already collected by the Census Bureau in other surveys such as the American Community Survey. In 2019, the first Trump administration made a similar attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census but was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court which found the justification for the question inadequate.
The second part of the proposal would prohibit questions about race which have been in every census since 1790, as well as questions about ethnicity and sexual orientation. This also prevents the 2030 census from implementing the 2024 Statistical Policy Directive-15, the federal rule setting new and updated combined race and ethnicity categories, including a Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) category. For Arab American communities already made invisible by being classified as white for decades, this would preemptively end the first opportunity to be accurately counted. The stakes go beyond MENA and immigrant communities alone and eliminating the data collection of these categories would also quell data outputs for Black, Latino, Native American, and other communities. This data is required to be collected by multiple federal civil rights statutes that are used by health researchers, local governments, and policymakers to identify needs and allocate resources.
Together, these changes could reduce representation and federal funding for communities with larger immigrant populations, limit data used for civil rights enforcement and public policy and discourage immigrant and mixed-status households from participating in the census. The proposal is not yet in effect, and public comments are open until October 13. Legal challenges are expected because the 14th Amendment, which was purposefully written to include “all persons” and not “citizens,” requires congressional representation to be based on the whole number of persons in each state.
Education Department Releases Civil Rights Data After Eight-Month Delay
The Department of Education has released its Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) for the 2023–24 school year more than eight months late. The collection covers virtually every public school and is a key federal source for identifying disparities in educational opportunities and school conditions, including discipline, harassment and bullying, disability, staffing, and access to advanced coursework. Unlike previous releases, the Department initially published the data without a report summarizing national findings and trends. It also suppressed data collected on nonbinary students and gender identity-based harassment. That information could have helped identify patterns in how nonbinary students experience bullying and other school conditions. The administration has also removed those questions from the 2025–26 collection. Alongside staffing reductions and other changes at the Office for Civil Rights, these changes make it harder to identify disparities, monitor civil-rights concerns, and compare student experiences over time.
Appeals Court Blocks IRS Disclosure of Taxpayer Information to ICE
In a unanimous decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld a preliminary injunction blocking the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from sharing taxpayer information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Under the policy, the IRS processed ICE requests involving approximately 1.28 million people and disclosed more than 47,000 taxpayer records. The court found the IRS violated federal law by releasing information in response to requests that did not provide a valid or complete address. The court also questioned whether the IRS required ICE to identify a specific connection between each taxpayer and a criminal investigation, as required before taxpayer information may be shared with law enforcement. The injunction prevents the IRS from making additional disclosures through the challenged process. The approximately 47,000 records already provided to ICE were shared before the lower court intervened, and the underlying case remains pending.
Federal Court Blocks Expanded Use of SAVE Data for Voter Lists Checks
A divided D.C. Circuit panel declined to pause a lower-court order blocking the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from using Social Security data and bulk-search tools in the Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database to check voter citizenship. SAVE was designed to help government agencies verify citizenship and immigration status of those applying for public benefits and licenses, not as a definitive voter-verification system. Its results frequently rely on incomplete or outdated information and can incorrectly identify eligible US citizens and potential noncitizens, placing their voter registration at risk. The Social Security data and bulk-search tools remain disabled nationwide while the administration appeals and asks the Supreme Court to restore them. Before the court order, states used SAVE to review more than 67 million voter registrations. The administration has asked the Supreme Court to temporarily restore the Social Security data and bulk-search tools while the case is appealed ahead of the November 3 midterm elections.