The Trump administration’s new attack on marine monuments

  This past Saturday, September 15, marked the second anniversary of the creation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument—the largest monument in U.S. Atlantic waters. From ancient deep-water corals to an incredibly diverse array of marine mammals, seabirds, and fish, the monument is home to an extraordinary abundance of rare marine life. Unfortunately, even being 150 miles offshore has not spared the monument from the Trump administration’s anti-environment agenda.

We know the citizenship question will hurt the census. Alabama already tried it.

  Common sense tells you that adding a question to the 2020 Census asking about citizenship status will depress response rates from an immigrant community already traumatized by President Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and deportation machinery. But common sense was not enough for the Trump administration.

  Certainly, it was not enough for Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose department is responsible for administering the census and who has bowed to pressure from the Justice Department to include a citizenship question. Refusing to acknowledge the question’s predictable impact, Ross has instead insisted that “no one [has] provided evidence that reinstating a citizenship question on the decennial census would materially decrease response rates.”