CENSUS DEADLINE
Afederal judge rules the Trump administration cannot cut short the once-a-decade count.
A federal judge in California ruled that the Trump-administration cannot retract its pandemicera deadline to complete the 2020census, giving the states until Oct. 31 to complete the once-adecade population count.
Lawyers for the government immediately appealed the late Thursday ruling, which remains in effect unless a higher court intervenes.
U.S. District Judge LucyH. Koh issued a preliminary injunction enjoining the census from enforcing its revised Sept. 30 deadline.
Thomas Wolf of the Brennan Center for Justice, which represents plaintiffs, said the ruling marked “a significant victory in the ongoing fight to save the 2020 Census from a critical undercount of our country’s communities of color.”
“The census must count everyone, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or citizenship status,” he said. “To do that in the face of COVID-19, hurricanes and wildfires, the Census Bureau needs all the time it asked and planned for in the spring.”
Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who is among the named plaintiffs in the case, said an undercount in Harris County’s multiracial and multiethnic neighborhoods would “perpetuate the inequities already faced by these
communities.”
Justice Department lawyers and Census Bureau officials did not respond to requests for comment.
The California case, one of several legal challenges to census policy around the country, was initiated by the National Urban League along with Harris County and an array of civil rights groups, civic organizations, and tribal and local governments. It specifically challenges the decision by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Census Director Steven Dillingham in early August to bump up their own revised deadline.
Attorney Melissa Arbus Sherry argued at a virtual hearing Tuesday in San Jose, Calif., that the government never provided a reason for speeding up the process. They said shortening the deadline amid the pandemic was “arbitrary and capricious” and would cause “irreparable harm” to the accuracy of the count. They said it was perfectly lawful to break the statutory deadline for the census in response to COVID-19, citing the government’s own revised plan introduced as the pandemic was taking hold in mid-April and subsequent internal documents between officials saying they could not complete data collection within the original timeline.
The Justice Department lawyer, Alexander V. Sverdlov, called the lawsuit a “bait and switch.” Officials had weighed the risks of changing the dates, she said, and it was “deeply, deeply troubling” to call it “arbitrary and capricious” for the government to try to meet the statutory deadline .
The judge found the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits that the government had been “arbitrary and capricious” in changing the deadlines a second time. Experts, civil rights groups, local and tribal entities and President Donald Trump all backed the COVID-19 plan and, according to court documents, the president himself had said meeting the statutory deadlines amid a pandemic was impossible: “I don’t know that you even have to ask (Congress). This is called an act of God. This is called a situation that has to be. They have to give it. I think 120 days isn’t nearly enough.”
Within two days of the hearing, the judge delivered a 78-page opinion laying out how Trump officials in the months that followed the initial extension failed to consider their constitutional and statutory obligations to produce an accurate census. They did not adequately explain their reasoning for changing the plan and the new deadline was delivered without considering any alternatives, Koh wrote. The explanation for the altered date also ran counter to the evidence before them.
Natalia Cornelio, legal affairs director for Ellis, said at the point Trump yanked back the deadline in early August, only 63 percent of households nationwide and 54 percent in Houston had responded to the census.
Despite those numbers, on Aug. 3, the census director abruptly announced what the court is calling the “re-plan,” which shortened the timeline for households to respond by Sept. 30 .
ornelio said the accuracy C of the census count is critical to Harris County’s future.
“Its outcome determines political representation and billions of dollars of funding for healthcare, education, disaster relief, and housing,” she said.
Right now, Harris County is looking at an estimated undercount of 600,000 households, based on data from Civis Analytics, the company the county has partnered with to track its census outreach, she said.
One area likely to suffer from an undercount is the southern portion of the county, a pie-slice-shaped region extending from downtown Houston to Bellaire to League City, according to Steven Romalewski, who maps census data for the Center for Urban Research at CUNY. In that area, 11percent of the door-knocking has yet to be completed, a feat thatwould likely would have been impossible with less than a week to spare to the Sept. 30 deadline, he said.
In parts of Fort Bend and Galveston counties, nearly18 percent of the door-knocking needs to be finished. And in Montgomery County 12 percent of homes have yet to be documented.
Romalewski said the ruling could have a major impact on areas with a relatively low “completion” rate for the door-knocking operation that’s meant to visit every household that has not responded. With more time to complete theprocess, census enumerators can attempt to visit households more than once and will be likelier to talk with someone inperson or determine that a unit is vacant. The fallback, which census officials consider less accurate, is to to count residents through administrative records.