DNC chairman Tom Perez equated the question regarding citizenship on the U.S. Census to voter suppression during an MSNBC interview on Tuesday.
Democrats have been opposed to plans by the Trump administration to reinsert a question as to whether or not the respondent was a United States citizen.
"They want to change it to count the number of U.S. citizens so that they can engage in very not subtle voter suppression," Perez said. "That is illegal and that is totally inconsistent with what the North Star of the census in Republican and Democratic administrations have been."
"This is just another divide-and-conquer effort. This is a first cousin of these voter ID laws sought to make sure that African Americans and Latinos can't vote," he added. "This is not who we are as a nation. This is not why people died for the passage of the Voting Rights Act."
Democrats are worried that a citizenship question will diminish census response from illegal immigrants and would, therefore, have a negative effect on the allotment of members of Congress assigned to each state for a decade until the next census.
California has sued the Trump administration over the question in yet another feud between that state's government and the White House over policy.