CA MENA Civil Rights Statement on Proposed Changes to the 2030 Census
September 17, 2026
The CA MENA Civil Rights Coalition opposes the proposal of the U.S. Census Bureau to strip millions of U.S. residents from the population count that determines congressional representation and discontinue data collection on racial and ethnic identity. The Census proposal contains two elements: 1) the exclusion of non-citizens from the count used to apportion House seats and Electoral College votes after the 2030 census; and 2) the removal of questions used to determine the racial and ethnic makeup of the population.
The proposed changes represent a significant regression in federal civil rights, representation, and protected freedoms. They will have a significant and detrimental impact on the quality of 2030 decennial census data and undermine the ability of public agencies to efficiently and effectively serve the public.
The first element of the proposed change would redraw the boundaries of American political power to exclude populations who live and work in America without the benefit of formal citizenship. The second element would prevent the public from using data on race and ethnicity as they have for decades; to improve public understanding and design more effective community programs. In advancing this proposal, the Census Bureau risks chilling participation in the decennial census and exacerbating data privacy concerns, two problems they specifically invoked as justification.
Deciding in advance whose presence in this country is allowed to count is not a technical adjustment to a census form, but an exclusionary answer to an existentially important question about who in America is worthy of rights and representation. That fight is precisely why organizations forged by and for MENA communities came together in the first place: to advance freedom for all Americans. That is, to defend the basic premise that everyone who lives here counts. MENA community organizations across the country, including our founding members and their state coalition predecessors who have long organized in California and elsewhere, were built in part by refugees and asylum seekers fleeing conflict and persecution. Many community members hold temporary protected status, pending asylum claims, or other non-permanent legal statuses. Under this proposal, they could be erased entirely from the count that determines how many representatives their communities have in Congressional House.
This proposal further complicates a still unfinished fight for MENA recognition. In March 2024, federal standards were revised to collect detailed, disaggregated data on race ethnicity through a single, combined question that features a distinct “Middle Eastern or North African” response option, a change for which our coalition's founding organizations and their state-level predecessors long advocated. The Census Bureau had already quietly begun abandoning the updated standards before this proposal, declining to use them in the 2027 American Community Survey. Eliminating race and ethnicity questions on the 2030 census further undermines long-sought MENA recognition, misclassifying our communities once again and weakening the evidence base for the health, education, and economic disparities this coalition exists to document. This move comes at a time of escalating attacks against MENA communities. Our communities are already facing escalating discrimination and cannot afford to simultaneously lose the data infrastructure needed to prove it.
The CA MENA Civil Rights Coalition calls on policymakers and public officials serving MENA communities to:
Publicly and unequivocally reject this proposal
Support democratic efforts to strengthen the core decennial census data and promote efficiency without undercounting or underserving specific populations.
Enable meaningful participation in data collection activities from historically underrepresented and underserved communities, including through supporting and funding trusted-messenger outreach to MENA, immigrant, and refugee communities
Recommit to establishing safe, accurate, representative, and transparent demographic data on the census and all other public data collections
Invest in community-led research and data collection that meaningfully include MENA community-based organizations
We are committed to working with producers and users of public data to ensure that data collection is safe enough that people are willing to participate in it, meaningful enough that communities appreciate its purpose, accurate and representative enough to reflect the full diversity of the population, and useful enough to improve overall outcomes for all Americans.
The California MENA Civil Rights Coalition is a statewide coalition of MENA-led, MENA-constituency based, and MENA-serving organizations that advocate for the recognition, civil rights, and equitable representation of California's Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) communities.
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Signed Organizations:
Arab American Civic Council
Arab Cultural Center
Armenian-American Advancement Network
Armenian-American Research and Public Narratives Institute (AARPI)
Armenian-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (AACAD)
Council On American-Islamic Relations - California (CAIR CA)
Majdal: Arab Community Center of San Diego
National Iranian American Council (NIAC)
National Network for Arab American Communities (NNAAC)
Somali Family Service