Days after the US Supreme Court halted the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, the US Census Bureau on Tuesday started the process of printing the questionnaire without the controversial query.
Attorneys of the administration of US President Donald Trump notified parties in lawsuits challenging the question that the printing of the hundreds of millions of documents for the counts would be starting, National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law executive director Kristen Clarke said.
US Department of Justice spokeswoman Kelly Laco confirmed that there would be “no citizenship question on 2020 census.”
US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said that while he respected the Supreme Court’s decision, he strongly disagreed with it.
“The Census Bureau has started the process of printing the decennial questionnaires without the question,” Ross said in a statement. “My focus, and that of the bureau and the entire department, is to conduct a complete and accurate census.”
Trump had said after the high court’s decision last week that he would ask his attorneys about possibly delaying next spring’s decennial census until the Supreme Court could revisit the matter, raising questions about whether printing of the census materials would start as planned this month.
For months, the Trump administration had argued that the courts needed to decide quickly whether the citizenship question could be added because of the deadline to starting printing materials this week.
On Tuesday night, Trump wrote on Twitter that the Supreme Court ruling marked a “very sad time for America.”
He also said he had asked the commerce and justice departments “to do whatever is necessary to bring this most vital of questions, and this very important case, to a successful conclusion.”
Even though the bureau is relying on most respondents to answer the questionnaire by Internet next year, hundreds of millions of printed postcards and letters are to be sent out in March next year reminding residents about the census, and those who do not respond digitally would be mailed paper questionnaires.
“The Supreme Court’s ruling left little opportunity for the administration to cure the defects with its decision to add a citizenship question and, most importantly, they were simply out of time given the deadline for printing forms,” Clarke said in an e-mail.
Opponents of the question said it would discourage participation by immigrants and residents who are in the country illegally, resulting in inaccurate figures for a count that determines the distribution of about US$675 billion in federal spending and how many congressional districts each state gets.
The Trump administration had said the question was being added to aid in enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voters’ access to the ballot box.
However, in the Supreme Court’s decision, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four more liberal members in saying the administration’s justification for the question “seems to have been contrived.”
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