Trump ordered to honor census deadline
Government appeals ruling, which allows one-month leeway
A federal judge in California ruled that the Trump administration cannot retract its pandemicera deadline to complete the 2020 census, 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 Lucy H. Koh issued a preliminary injunction enjoining the census from enforcing its revised Sept. 30 deadline.
Koh said the shortened schedule ordered by President Donald Trump’s administration likely would produce inaccurate results that would last a decade.
The judge sided with civil rights groups and local governments that sued the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Commerce, which oversees the statistical agency, arguing that minorities and others in hard-to-count communities would be missed if the counting ends this month.
In granting the preliminary injunction, the judge said the plaintiffs were likely to succeed at a trial. Despite concerns raised by top Census Bureau officials about the shortened schedule, the Trump administration failed to consider its duty to produce an accurate head count and neglected to adequately explain a reason for it, she said.
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.”
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, 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 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 howTrump 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 Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who is among the named plaintiffs in the case, said at the point Trump yanked back the deadline in early August, only 63 percent of households nationwide 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.