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A federal judge has ruled against the Trump administration’s addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.
In the first major ruling on the controversial question, U.S. District Judge Furman of New York’s Southern District court ordered the administration to stop its plans to add the question to the survey “without curing the legal defects” identified in his opinion.
“This ruling is a forceful rebuke of the Trump administration’s attempt to weaponize the census for an attack on immigrant communities,” said Dale Ho, an attorney for the ACLU, which was a plaintiff in the case.
The Trump administration had tried several times to stop the case from going forward, including requests to the Supreme Court; the administration is likely to appeal Furman’s decision in the high court.
Plaintiffs in the trial include 18 states and several cities and jurisdictions, along with civil rights groups. It is one of three trial that arose from Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s March decision to add the question.
Opponents of the question say it will reduce response rates in immigrant communities and make the constitutionally mandated decennial survey more costly and less accurate. The government had said the question was necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act.
