WASHINGTON – Attorney General Karl A. Racine announced today that the District of Columbia has joined a coalition of 18 states, six cities, and the bipartisan United States Conference of Mayors in a legal challenge to block the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.
The suit, filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, asserts that the decision announced by the Department of Commerce violates the mandate in the U.S. Constitution to conduct an “actual Enumeration” via a decennial census to determine “the whole number of persons” residing in the United States. The suit notes that the census is used to make important determinations about representation and resources, including the distribution of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, the allocation of electors to the Electoral College, and how billions of federal dollars are awarded each year. In addition, the District uses U.S. Census information to draw ward, Advisory Neighborhood Commission, and voting precinct boundaries.
“In the District, we value all of our residents – regardless of their citizenship status. But this capricious decision by the Trump administration increases the likelihood that residents in our city will decline to participate in the census out of fear,” said Attorney General Racine. “When residents are not counted for any reason, our resources and representation suffer, and our community suffers.”
The lawsuit says that the addition of the citizenship question will jeopardize the overall accuracy of the population count by deterring people in immigrant communities from participating – a conclusion backed by decades of Census Bureau research and experience. The Trump administration this year disregarded that experience, failing to follow established agency procedures for determining how a change to the census would affect accuracy and response rates. In fact, the suit notes, the Commerce Department conceded it “is not able to determine definitively how inclusion of a citizenship question on the decennial census will impact responsiveness.”
Even without a citizenship question in the 2010 census, District of Columbia residents failed to return more than 21.7 percent of the census forms they received via mail, requiring enumerators to follow up with phone calls and site visits to collect the needed information. Immigrants accounted for 13.3 percent of District residents in 2016, according to the Migration Policy Institute’s analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, and about one in four immigrants in the District is undocumented, according to data gathered by the Pew Research Center.
The suit further alleges that the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies will amplify negative effects of a citizenship inquiry on census participation rates. Just this week, President Trump posted a message on Twitter that “our country is being stolen” by immigrants coming from Mexico and from Central and South America. He has previously said that America should prefer “people from Norway” over immigrants from Africa or Latin America.
The District of Columbia stands to lose millions of federal dollars if all its residents are not counted accurately in the census. Among the federal funds that use census population data to allocate spending are Highway Trust Fund grants, Urbanized Area Formula Grants for transportation projects, Child Care Development Grant funds, and Medicaid reimbursements.
The lawsuit was led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and joined by the attorneys general of Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington state; they were joined by the mayors of Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Providence, San Francisco, and Seattle; and the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
Click here to view the text of the lawsuit.