Census Overview & Challenges

Despite Texas experiencing tremendous growth since the 2010 Census, government officials did not establish a state-sponsored Complete Count Committee or dedicate any funds for the 2020 Census, making it extremely difficult to count all Texans. State Sponsored CCCs work in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau to support their efforts down to a community level.

In 2019, State Representative César Blanco, and Senator Juan Hinojosa filed bills proposing a state-level Complete Count Committee and funding for Census outreach. However, neither bill was given a committee hearing.

There was a very real possibility of an undercount in the 2020 Census in Texas due to this lack of state-level funding and leadership. Recognizing the critical impact the 2020 Census would have on Texans for the next decade, local governments, nonprofits, and other organizations stepped in to fill the gap.

Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution mandates an “actual enumeration” of people every ten years to ensure states are represented in the federal government proportionally to their population. The decennial count is of all people living in the U.S., including citizens and noncitizens.

The citizenship debate for the 2020 Census sparked in 2017, when the Department of Justice proposed including a question on citizenship status. They cited that the data collected would help enforce federal voting rights laws.

However, immigrants such as Latinos or Asian-Americans perceived the risk of citizenship data being used for immigration enforcement. While the U.S. Census Bureau is bound by law to keep your personal information confidential, especially from other federal agencies, many immigrants were afraid to respond to the 2020 Census.

The U.S. Census Bureau may miss counting residents if they are hard to contact, locate, survey, or engage. 1 in 4 Texans – nearly 7 million people – live in hard-to-count communities, posing a huge challenge for the 2020 Census.

Hard-To-Count (HTC) communities are more likely to rely on federal resources such as after-school programs, meal assistance, and health clinics could miss out on millions in federal funding if their households aren’t counted in the Census.

Fast facts about Texas’ HTC communities

The Texas Demographic Center has done extensive research on the historically undercounted populations of Texas. Findings include:

Learn about the strategies utilized to engage with HTC communities across Texas.

The Coronavirus, also called COVID-19 or COVID, gripped the world in 2019, throughout 2020, and into 2021. Unfortunately, the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic coincided with the U.S. Census Bureau’s operational timeline.

The original U.S. Census Bureau operational timeline had a window of March 12, 2020 to July 31, 2020. On March 11, just a day before the U.S. Census Bureau opened the 2020 Census, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic.

Immediately, local governments, healthcare and education systems, nonprofits, and other public service organizations were pulled away from their Census efforts to focus on battling the COVID-19 pandemic and providing emergency resources to those in need. Many Complete Count Committees had to halt their community outreach planning as in-person events were temporarily banned to prevent the spread of the virus.