5 Lawsuits on Citizenship Question Proceed
The Trump administration’s legal problems continue to mount over their push to add a citizenship status question on the 2020 Census, with a total of five lawsuits moving through federal courts.
According to the Census Bureau’s own research, the addition of a citizenship question would discourage non-citizens from responding and lower response rates overall, decreasing accuracy.
Plaintiffs in these lawsuits argue that the addition of a citizenship question to the census is a deliberately partisan move by the Trump administration to undercount immigrants and communities of color, and that the decision obstructs the fulfillment of the constitutionally mandated responsibility to conduct a census that counts all people in the U.S.
In a court opinion allowing one lawsuit to proceed, U.S. District Judge George Hazel wrote that "it cannot be said that the Census Bureau's use of the citizenship question bears a 'reasonable relationship to the accomplishment of an actual enumeration of the population.’" Hazel further added that "there is evidence indicating that the [Commerce] Secretary and other senior administration or campaign officials were determined to include the citizenship question in the 2020 Census and sought out [the Justice Department] to provide a legally defensible reason to do so.”
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