A federal judge in New York on Tuesday barred the Trump administration from adding a question about citizenship to the 2020 census.
U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ruled that while a question on citizenship would be constitutional, U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had added it arbitrarily and did not follow proper procedure. The ruling comes after a three-week trial in November.
“Secretary Ross’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census — even if it did not violate the Constitution itself — was unlawful for a multitude of independent reasons and must be set aside,” he wrote.
Among other things, the judge said, Ross didn’t 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 to properly analyze the effect the question would have on immigrant households.
Other civil rights groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, applauded the court’s decision.
“This ruling is a forceful rebuke of the Trump administration’s attempt to weaponize the census for an attack on immigrant communities,” director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, Dale Ho, said in a statement. “The inevitable result would have been – and the administration’s clear intent was – to strip federal resources and political representation from those needing it most.” – READ MORE