While that doesn't directly affect the drawing of federal congressional districts, it could keep Republicans in power in states like Texas for the 2021 redrawing of federal districts - and without the protection of the Voting Rights Act this time, they'll have a freer hand to gerrymander:
On July 11, a visibly agitated Donald Trump appeared in the White House Rose Garden to announce that his administration was dropping its bid to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. The Supreme Court had blocked the plan two weeks earlier, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing that the administration’s claim that the question was needed to better enforce the Voting Rights Act “seems to have been contrived.” Civil rights groups said such a question would spark fear that the information would lead to deportations, causing a severe undercount of immigrant communities. Census Bureau researchers predicted it could lead to 9 million people not filling out the census. But, Trump said defiantly, “I’m here to say we are not backing down on our effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population.”
Trump then made a move that could still turn citizenship data into a political tool to boost the influence of white Republican areas. He announced an executive order calling on federal agencies to send all existing information on who is and isn’t a citizen to the Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau. Trump suggested how those details might be used: “Some states may want to draw state and local legislative districts based upon the voter-eligible population.” For the past decade, Republicans have sought to exclude noncitizens from the redistricting process. Now Trump was going even further, suggesting that anyone who is not eligible to vote, including children, did not have to be counted toward apportioning representation at the state and local level.
It’s long been a bedrock principle of American democracy that elected officials represent all of their constituents, whether or not they are eligible to vote. Almost all congressional and state legislative districts are drawn based on their total populations, including voters and nonvoters, citizens and noncitizens, adults and kids. Yet while the 14th Amendment requires that congressional districts are based on total population, the Supreme Court has never definitively ruled on what the standard should be for state districts, although since the 1960s nearly all states have counted everyone. Drawing state legislative districts based on eligible voters instead of total population would be a huge win for Republicans, who tend to represent areas with fewer noncitizens. Democrats currently hold all of the 50 upper state House seats with the highest percentages of foreign-born noncitizen residents.
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If Texas takes Trump up on his offer to use federal data to only count voters, it would have profound consequences. Democrats need only nine seats to regain control of the Texas House of Representatives for the first time since 2002, but redrawing districts based on eligible voters would keep the state solidly red, shifting eight or more seats back to the GOP, according to an analysis by Andrew Beveridge, a professor of sociology at Queens College in New York. In the past year, Texas has gained about nine Latino residents for every white resident, and only 34 percent of the state’s kids are white. These demographics should help Democrats when new maps are drawn in 2021. But excluding children and noncitizens from the count would radically reduce the impact of demographic change. Moreover, the year 2021 will be the first time in half a century that Texas and other states with a history of racial discrimination will not have to get their redistricting maps approved by the federal government under the Voting Rights Act. These changes, combined with a recent Supreme Court decision that federal courts cannot review partisan gerrymandering, could lead to an unprecedented effort by Republican-controlled states to weaken Democratic power and sideline communities of color.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/01/citizenship-trump-census-voting-rights-texas/
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