A federal judge in Manhattan ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census was unlawful.
In his ruling, Judge Jesse Furman, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s decision to add the question to the census was “arbitrary and capricious” and enjoined the administration from including it on the questionnaire.
Furman, an Obama appointee, said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross violated a statute that requires him to collect data through the acquisition and use of “administrative records” instead of through “direct inquiries” on a survey such as the census.
Ross announced in March that he was granting a request from the Department of Justice (DOJ) to reinstate the citizenship question on the decennial population count to help the agency better enforce the Voting Rights Act.
The decision led to a flurry of lawsuits across the country.
In his 277-page ruling, Furman called Ross’s violations of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) “egregious.”
“He failed to consider several important aspects of the problem; alternately ignored, cherry-picked, or badly misconstrued the evidence in the record before him; acted irrationally both in light of that evidence and his own stated decisional criteria; and failed to justify significant departures from past policies and practices — a veritable smorgasbord of classic, clear-cut APA violations,” he wrote.
Furman said he was unable to find that Ross’s decision to add the question was a pretext for impermissible discrimination as the challengers had argued. The judge said that was due, in part, to the Supreme Court’s decision to temporarily block a court order that would have forced Ross to be questioned under oath.
“As defense counsel more or less conceded during closing arguments, a deposition of Secretary Ross would have been the best evidence of the question at the heart of the due process inquiry — namely, the true nature of Secretary Ross’s intent in reinstating the citizenship question,” Furman said.
The case consolidated two separate lawsuits — one brought by 18 blue states, the District of Columbia, 15 cities and counties, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and another brought by a coalition of immigrant rights groups.
The American Civil Liberties Union called Furman’s ruling a “forceful rebuke of the Trump administration’s attempt to weaponize the census for an attack on immigrant communities.”
“The evidence at trial, including from the government’s own witness, exposed how adding a citizenship question would wreck the once-in-a-decade count of the nation’s population,” Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement.
“The inevitable result would have been — and the administration’s clear intent was — to strip federal resources and political representation from those needing it most.”
Don’t judge follow the law . Didn’t know they write them to . Don’t we have the house and senators for that part