Activists: Emails show bias in census move

Court filing challenges citizenship question plan

BALTIMORE — Voting rights activists argue that newly discovered 2015 correspondence between a GOP redistricting expert and a current Census Bureau official bolster arguments that discrimination motivated efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 population survey.

The plaintiffs, who successfully challenged the question in a Maryland federal court, said in a filing late Friday that the email exchange between the late Republican consultant Thomas Hofeller and the Census Bureau official was discovered this past week. They say the documents give a federal judge, who previously ruled in their favor, latitude to re-examine whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross intended to discriminate by adding the citizenship question to the 2020 census.

While U.S. District Judge George Hazel issued a ruling in April to block the addition of the census question, he said the Maryland plaintiffs failed to prove that their equal protection rights were violated because they hadn’t shown that Ross and other officials acted with discriminatory intent.

“The trial record and the Hofeller documents both reveal that the central purpose of adding a citizenship question was to deprive Hispanics and noncitizens of political representation,” the plaintiffs argue.

Trump administration lawyers argued in filings before Hazel that the newly discovered documents don’t justify the “extraordinary request” to reopen a case already decided in the plaintiffs’ favor.

The Commerce Department issued a statement Saturday saying that Hofeller played no role in Ross’ decision to add the citizenship question: “All of Plaintiffs’ conspiracy theories are outlandish and should be disregarded.”

The U.S. Supreme Court is considering the citizenship question after Hazel’s ruling and similar ones by judges in New York and California who concluded the question was improperly added to the U.S. census. The high court could rule by July.

J. Scott Applewhite The Associated Press file Immigration activists rally outside the Supreme Court on April 23 as the justices hear arguments over the Trump administration’s plan to ask about citizenship as part of the 2020 census.