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Excerpt: "The Trump administration cannot put a question about citizenship status on the 2020 census, a federal judge in New York has ruled, in a boost to proponents of counting immigrants, regardless of legal status, among the US population."

Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. (photo: Anthony Kwan/Bloomberg)
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. (photo: Anthony Kwan/Bloomberg)


Judge Blocks White House Plan to Ask Citizenship Question on Census

By Associated Press

15 January 19


New York judge ruled that the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, had not followed proper administrative procedures

he Trump administration cannot put a question about citizenship status on the 2020 census, a federal judge in New York has ruled, in a boost to proponents of counting immigrants, regardless of legal status, among the US population.

In a 277-page decision that will not be the final word on the issue, US district judge Jesse Furman ruled that while such a question would be constitutional, the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, had moved to add it to the census arbitrarily and had not followed proper administrative procedures.

“He failed to consider several important aspects of the problem; alternately ignored, cherry-picked, or badly misconstrued the evidence in the record before him; acted irrationally both in light of that evidence and his own stated decisional criteria; and failed to justify significant departures from past policies and practices,” Furman wrote on Friday in the ruling.

Among other things, the judge said, Ross did not follow a law requiring that he give Congress three years’ notice of any plan to add a question about citizenship to the census.

The ruling came in a case in which a dozen states or big cities and immigrants’ rights groups argued that the commerce department, which designs the census, had failed properly to analyze the effect the question would have on households where immigrants live.

A separate suit on the same issue, filed by the state of California, is under way in San Francisco.

The US supreme court is also poised to address the issue on 19 February, meaning the legal issue is far from decided.

In the New York case, the plaintiffs accused Donald Trump’s Republican administration of adding the question intentionally to discourage immigrants from participating in the census. That could lead to a population undercount and possibly fewer seats in Congress in places that tend to vote Democratic, which especially includes Hispanic voters.

Even people living in the US legally, they said, might dodge the census questionnaire out of fears they could be targeted by a hostile administration.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) argued that Ross had no such motive and acted properly after consulting with Census Bureau staff members and others.

When Ross announced the plan in March, he said the question was needed in part to help the government enforce the Voting Rights Act, a 1965 law meant to protect political representation of minority groups.

Ross said politics played no role in the decision, initially testifying under oath that he had not spoken to anyone in the White House on the subject.

Later, however, DoJ lawyers submitted papers saying Ross remembered speaking in spring 2017 about adding the question with the former senior White House adviser Steve Bannon and the then attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

The US supreme court blocked Ross from being deposed, but let the trial proceed, over the objections of Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, on the conservative end of the bench.

The constitutionally mandated census is supposed to count all people living in the US, including non-citizens and immigrants living in the country illegally.

The Census Bureau’s staff estimated that adding a citizenship question could depress responses in households with at least one non-citizen by as much as 5.8%. That could be particularly damaging in states like New York or California, which have large immigrant populations.

Justice department lawyers argued that the estimate was overblown and that, even if they were true, that did not mean Ross exceeded his legal authority in adding the question.

The administration faces an early summer deadline for finalizing questions so questionnaires can be printed.

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