A federal judge in California late Thursday blocked the Trump administration from ending the 2020 census count next week instead of Oct. 31 as the bureau had planned, saying the plaintiffs had proved the government's truncated schedule could lead to an inaccurate count.
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in the Northern District of California granted a preliminary injunction in the case filed by the National Urban League and a group of counties, cities, advocacy groups and individuals. Koh had, earlier this month, issued a temporary restraining order to continue the count, which has been beset this year by the coronavirus pandemic, natural disasters and legal tussling.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in a statement called the ruling "a victory for our Constitution and American Democracy," and plaintiffs called it a win for people in harder-to-count communities who may have been missed under a rushed count.
"The court's decision affirms our contention that changes to the census schedule will irreparably harm the integrity of the 2020 Census and result in a devastating undercount of vulnerable communities," said Marc Morial, the Urban League's president and chief executive. "Career officials at the Census Bureau opposed the shortened schedule precisely for these reasons, and to avoid the perception of political manipulation, and we are confident that integrity and equity will win out over the partisan vandalism that threatens our democracy."
Melissa Arbus Sherry, an attorney with Latham & Watkins who argued the case, said in a statement, "As the Court recognized, the Census Bureau has itself repeatedly recognized that a full, fair, and accurate count takes time, especially when faced with a historic pandemic. Every day that the 2020 Census count continues, and Census operations appropriately continue, will help ensure the accuracy and completeness of this once-in-a-decade tally."
The departments of Justice and Commerce did not respond to requests for comment.
FEAR FOR QUALITY
The Census Bureau says it has completed counting 97% of the nation's households despite the challenges. But experts worry that the completion statistics mask a decline in quality because a household can be deemed counted in many ways, with wildly varying precision.
The rates do not show the share of households that have been counted by reliable methods like internet or in-person interviews, versus by dicier means like asking a neighbor or relying on personal information from a database.
Attorneys for the Census Bureau and the Department of Commerce said Friday that they would file an appeal and asked the judge to suspend the injunction while that happens.
"Were the Bureau to miss these deadlines, Congress could well decide to disregard the 2020 census results in conducting apportionment, as it previously did for the 1920 census," the attorneys for the federal government said in court papers.
In her ruling, Koh, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, found that the government's explanation for why it had shortened the timeline ran "counter to the facts."
Before the coronavirus pandemic hit in March, around the same time the census started for most U.S. residents, the bureau had planned to complete the census by the end of July.
In April, in response to the pandemic, it extended the deadline to the end of October.
Then, on Aug. 3, the government abruptly announced a "Replan" in which the count would end Sept. 30, a month before the date it had originally requested, and that the data would be reported by the end of the year instead of the original deadline of April 30.
Department of Justice lawyers had argued that the government had truncated the count in response to Congress' failure to act on the bureau's earlier request to extend the statutory deadline for delivering the data.
But Koh found that even as Congress was taking "major steps" toward extending the deadline, the Commerce Department was already pressuring the bureau to accelerate the count.
An email from Tim Olson, associate director for field operations at the Census Bureau, to his colleagues called it "ludicrous" to believe a full count could be completed before Oct. 31 and that anyone thinking the apportionment numbers would be turned in by Dec. 31 "has either a mental deficiency or a political motivation."
Koh referred to a July 29 House Oversight and Reform hearing at which bureau director Steven Dillingham did not support extending the deadline but rather "sidestepped questions" about whether the administration had reversed its position.
"Accordingly, Defendants' explanation -- that the Replan was adopted in order to meet the December 31, 2020 statutory deadline because Congress failed to act -- runs counter to the facts," she wrote. "Those facts show not only that the Bureau could not meet the statutory deadline, but also that the Bureau had received pressure from the Commerce Department to cease seeking an extension of the deadline."
The evidence supported the plaintiffs' claim that the government's decision was "arbitrary and capricious," in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, according to the ruling. "Single-mindedly sacrificing" a complete and accurate census in order to meet a congressionally mandated deadline "can itself violate the APA," she wrote.
IRREPARABLE HARM
The ruling also found that the jurisdictions and groups that had filed the suit would suffer irreparable harm from an inaccurate census, including a loss of federal funding and congressional representation, both of which are determined by decennial census data.
Koh said inaccuracies produced from a shortened schedule would affect the distribution of federal funding and political representation over the next 10 years. The census is used to determine how $1.5 trillion in federal spending is distributed each year and how many congressional seats each state gets.
A federal court in Maryland is expected to rule soon on a similar challenge to the shortened schedule.
This week, the Trump administration also asked the Supreme Court to overturn or expedite a review of a separate ruling against a memo from the president that said people in the country illegally should be excluded when using census data for allocating congressional seats to the states.
On Thursday, House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., sent a letter to Dillingham asking about leaked documents that appear to show the bureau breaking or changing its rules for the enumeration of homeless people in order to finish the count by Sept. 30. Dillingham said bureau officials would answer her questions Friday in a regularly scheduled briefing.
Maloney and other lawmakers have expressed concern about the change in schedule, saying a rushed count would hurt communities in both Democratic and Republican states.
A bipartisan Senate bill introduced this month by Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, would extend the count through at least Oct. 31 and extend the data reporting deadline by four months.
Census experts say post-count analysis and adjustments are key to an accurate count; the government's Replan would have shortened it from six months to three months. A date extension approved by lawmakers could be vetoed by the president but still could add weight to challenges in court.
Koh's preliminary injunction suspended that end-of-the-year deadline, giving Census Bureau statisticians time to crunch the numbers for apportionment from the start of November until the end of next April, for the time being.
Otherwise, an expected appeal of Koh's decision by the government "continues uncertainty" for field operations, Vanita Gupta, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a tweet Friday. "It's why Congress must still act."
Information for this article was contributed by Tara Bahrampour of The Washington Post; by Mike Schneider of The Associated Press; and by Michael Wines of The New York Times.