A federal judge ordered the Census Bureau on Saturday to stop shutting down operations and resume its full-scale nationwide population count through Sept. 17, when the judge will consider the Trump administration’s plan to end the census survey a month ahead of schedule.
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh of San Jose issued a temporary restraining order at the request of civil rights organizations and local governments, including San Jose and Los Angeles, that fear a curtailed census will deprive them of congressional representation and federal funding based on population counts.
“An inaccurate count would not be remedied for another decade, which would affect the distribution of federal and state funding, the deployment of services, and the allocation of local resources for a decade,” Koh said in her ruling.
The Census Bureau announced Aug. 3 that it would end the nationwide survey on Sept. 30, a month ahead of the previous schedule, in order to meet a Dec. 31 deadline for submitting the data.
Koh will hear arguments Sept. 17 on requests by the plaintiffs for an injunction that would reverse the one-month speedup. They sought an immediate restraining order after the Justice Department told Koh in a court filing that the Census Bureau “has already begun taking steps to conclude field operations,” which “are scheduled to be wound down throughout September by geographic regions based on response rates within those regions.”
At a hearing Friday, Justice Department attorney Alexander Sverdlov told Koh that any “anxiety” about the census was “not warranted” and that operations were shutting down only when 85% to 90% of residents in a particular locale had responded. He argued in a court filing that said the government’s “decisions on how and when to complete a census turn on policy choices that are unreviewable political questions.”
The population count is crucial for states’ U.S. House representation and the distribution of $800 billion in federal aid each year. Separately, President Trump is seeking to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census, an action challenged by California and other states in multiple lawsuits.
Koh questioned the government’s explanations at Friday’s hearing and was equally skeptical in Saturday’s ruling.
The administration has insisted that moving the deadline up to Sept. 30 was necessary to deliver the census results to the president by Dec. 31, rather than by next April, under a previous timetable. But Koh said the Census Bureau’s deputy director, Albert Fontenot, “acknowledged publicly less than two months ago that the bureau is ‘past the window of being able to get accurate counts to the president by Dec. 31.’” She said the bureau’s head of field operations made the same admission in May.
Koh also quoted Fontenot as saying, in a court filing Friday night, that the bureau has begun terminating its temporary field staff in areas that have completed their work, and it is difficult to bring them back. That underscores the need for a restraining order halting any further cutbacks until the legality of the one-month delay is resolved, she said.
The ruling “is a necessary and encouraging first step toward saving the 2020 Census from a massive undercount that will disproportionately affect our country’s communities of color,” said attorney Thomas Wolf of the Brennan Center for Law and Justice, whose clients in the case include the National Urban League, the League of Women Voters and the NAACP.
Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer said Koh’s order “puts a firm stop to the Trump administration’s efforts to prematurely curtail census outreach.”
Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @BobEgelko
