1/15/19
A federal judge in Manhattan shot down the Trump administration’s attempt to ask about citizenship on the 2020 census Tuesday, potentially paving the way for the case to land before the Supreme Court. U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman found that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross violated the Administrative Procedures Act by adding the question but also that challengers were unable to prove that the question was intended to discriminate against non-citizens. Furman ripped Ross’ decision-making process in adding the question, saying in his 277-page opinion that Ross’ move to ask for citizenship status for the first time in nearly 60 years committed “egregious” violations of a law structured to allow for judicial and congressional review of the actions taken by federal agencies. A coalition of 18 states and the District of Columbia, 15 cities and counties, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, along with a second coalition of nongovernmental organizations led by the New York Immigration Coalition, sued the Commerce Department last spring over the planned inclusion of the question, which Furman’s ruling vacated. The plaintiffs argued that including a question on citizenship in the census would depress responses from the immigrant and Hispanic communities — two groups with historically low response rates to the census.
Ross has said he added the citizenship question in order to provide the Justice Department with more data to enforce laws protecting voters from discrimination. But leading researchers at the Census Bureau, which is part of Commerce, have objected to including the question, Furman pointed out Tuesday. Pointing to the role the census plays in the apportioning of congressional seats, drawing political districts and allocating federal and local funding, Furman said in his ruling that “the interest in an accurate count is immense." "Even small deviations from an accurate count can have major implications for states, localities, and the people who live in them — indeed, for the country as a whole, ” the judge wrote. Furman ripped the administration's support of the citizenship question, arguing that there are more cost-effective and efficient ways to count the citizenship status of those living in the U.S., writing in his opinion that Ross used pretext to defend the question. Ross “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 — a veritable smorgasbord of classic, clear-cut APA violations,” he said.