Second group of judges blocks Trump’s order on census tally
For the second time in two months, a panel of federal judges on Thursday blocked President Trump’s effort to exclude people in the U. S. illegally from being counted during the process of divvying up congressional seats by state.
The decision from a panel of three district judges in California went further than last month’s ruling by a panel of three federal judges in New York by saying that Trump’s order in July not only was unlawful but also violated the constitution. The New York judges ignored the question of the order’s constitutionality and just said it was unlawful.
“The policy which the Presidential Memorandum attempts to enact has already been rejected by the Constitution, the applicable statutes, and 230 years of history,” the judges in California wrote.
The Trump administration has appealed the New York decision to the Supreme Court, and the nation’s high court agreed to hear the case next month.
Other challenges to Trump’s order are pending in Maryland, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
The Department of Justice, which is representing the Trump administration, didn’t immediately respond to an email inquiry Thursday.
The case was heard before a panel of three district judges since it deals with how many congressional seats each state gets based on population figures from the onceadecade census — a process known as apportionment. Any appeal can bypass an appellate court and go straight to the Supreme Court.
During arguments earlier this month, Trump administration attorneys told the judges that any challenge to the order was premature and should wait until the apportionment numbers are turned in at year’s end.
Advocacy groups said the Census Bureau is rushing the dataprocessing phase in order to meet a Dec. 31 deadline for turning in numbers used for divvying up the congressional seats. The census also determines the distribution of $ 1.5 trillion in federal spending each year.
“The bureau urgently needs more time to process the data,” said Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of The Leadership
Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Bureau statisticians started crunching the numbers only last week after the Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration could stop the head count of every U. S. resident, leaving them only two and a half months to process apportionment data collected from the nation’s households.
The Census Bureau originally planned to have five months for processing the apportionment data under a plan that was developed in response to the pandemic. Under that plan, field operations would have been extended through Oct. 31, and data processing of the apportionment numbers would have continued through April 2021.
But the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, decided to end the count early so that data processing would be finished by Dec. 31.
Sticking to a Dec, 31 deadline would have allowed the Trump administration to control the data processing of the apportionment numbers no matter who wins the presidential election next month. That would give the Commerce Department the opportunity to implement a Trump order attempting to exclude people in the country illegally from the apportionment count, according to civil rights groups and local governments.
Meanwhile, the Census Bureau is still figuring out a method for determining the citizenship status of every U. S. resident. During a news conference on Wednesday, bureau officials refused to answer whether carrying out the order was feasible at this point.
The federal judges in California sided with a coalition of individuals and governments that had sued the Trump administration, arguing the order discriminates against people based on race, ethnicity, and national origin. The coalition included the state of California; the city of San Jose and the counties that are home to Houston and Seattle.