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, Judge Jesse Furman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered the administration to stop its plans to add the question to the survey “without curing the legal defects” identified in his opinion.
Plaintiffs hailed the decision. “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, director of the Voting Rights Project at 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 to the high court….