Census wrestles with shifting deadlines - now Oct. 5 - and natural disasters

Census takers will have a hard time finding the residents of this household.

Ignoring a federal judge’s ruling last week allowing the decennial head count of every U.S. resident to continue through Oct. 31, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross says the 2020 census will end Oct. 5 according to a one-sentence press release issued by the Census Bureau late Monday.

"The Secretary of Commerce has announced a target date of October 5, 2020 to conclude 2020 Census self-response and field data collection operations," said the press release.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh issued a preliminary injunction last Thursday suspending the Sept. 30 deadline and continuing the Census until at least through the end of October.

The press release came as a virtual hearing was being held in San Jose, California, as a follow-up to Koh’s ruling. The injunction issued last week suspended the Census Bureau’s deadline for ending the head count on Sept. 30, which automatically reverted back to an earlier Census Bureau plan ending field operations on Oct. 31.

The Oct. 31 deadline was agreed to by the Bureau because the coronavirus pandemic had derailed to Census timetable and field operations that required enumerators to go the households who had not yet self-reported.

But last August, the Bureau announced a return to the Sept. 31 deadline without explanation.

RESPOND to the U.S. Census online.

A lawsuit of civil rights organizations and local governments led by the National Urban League sought the Census to return to the October 31 deadline. Koh sought and explanation from the Census why the decision was made to revert to the September deadline.

Koh asked federal attorneys during Monday’s hearing to provide documents on how the Oct. 5 date was decided upon. When a federal government lawyer suggested that the decision-making was a moving target without any records, the judge asked, “A one sentence tweet? Are you saying that is enough reason to establish decision-making? A one sentence tweet?”

In her preliminary injunction issued Thursday, Koh said the Sept. 30 deadline would not provide enough time for an accurate count.

As Census takers continue to scramble to complete their task as best as possible while assuming the Oct. 5 deadline would go into effect. Koh had received messages from Census field offices that they were ordered to assume the Sept. 30 deadline was the effective end of their field operations.

Besides determining the political representation for communities, the data from the Census helps allocate about $1.5 trillion for government assistance.

"In 2010, in just watching what happened the census bureau, we know that there were a lot of gaps, maybe a lot of resources that didn’t land in our communities," said Victoria Huynh, Vice President of the Center for Pan Asian Community Services, to  11Alive in Georgia where the AAP community has grown by 83% in the past decade. 

"2020 is a really important time to capture that information, especially as those cities continue to grow and plan for that growth," said Karuna Ramachandran, the Deputy Director of "Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta."

Additionally, the Constitutionally mandated head count is having difficulty in those areas where wildfires and flooding has forced thousands of residents from their homes.

In Northern California, a Census manager told the staff working underneath her Monday that they needed to complete 99% of households in the the Santa Rosa region where new evacuation orders had been sent out because of threatening wildfires by Sept. 30, including 12,000 households yet to be counted in Mendocino County, reported the Associated Press.

Meanwhile, a measure passed by the U.S. House of the Representatives officially extending the deadline to Oct. 31 never went into effect because the Republican-controlled Senate has not voted on it.

The Trump administration is pushing for the early end to the Census because an inaccurate count -- especially of those areas with historically hard-to-count immigrants -- would likely lose representation if they are undercounted. 

The administration's earlier attempts to dissuade immigrants from participating in the Census -- by adding a question about citizenship status to the Census form and to not include undocumented immigrants when drawing boundaries for Congressional districts -- have been ruled illegal by the courts. 

EDITOR'S NOTE: A word of caution, this article is news laced with opinion. Readers are encouraged to seek multiple news sources to formulate their own positions.