Court orders Census count continue until October 31

The U.S. Census will continue it's field operations until Oct. 31 after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration sought an early end to the decennial head count of U.S. residents.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh issued her new order late Thursday in San Jose, Calif and described the Census Bureau one-sentence announcement stating an Oct. 5 deadline as "the most egregious violation," of her preliminary injunction that she ordered last week.

In her latest ruling Koh that the Census Bureau and Commerce Department, which oversees the agency, had violated the injunction she ordered last week "in several ways." She threatened them with sanctions or contempt proceedings if they violated the injunction again.

"Defendants' dissemination of erroneous information; lurching from one hasty, unexplained plan to the next; and unlawful sacrifices of completeness and accuracy of the 2020 Census are upending the status quo, violating the Injunction Order, and undermining the credibility of the Census Bureau and the 2020 Census," Koh wrote. "This must stop."

RELATED: Census wrestles with shifting deadlines and Mother Nature's wrath

“The court’s decision affirms our contention that changes to the census schedule will irreparably harm the integrity of the 2020 Census and result in a devastating undercount of vulnerable communities," said Marc H. Morial, President and CEO, National Urban League. "Career officials at the Census Bureau opposed the shortened schedule precisely for these reasons, and to avoid the perception of political manipulation, and we are confident that integrity and equity will win out over the partisan vandalism that threatens our democracy."

The judge ordered the Census Bureau, which employs hundreds of thousands of temporary workers for the national tally and had reportedly begun ending their employment, to send a text message to all of its employees on Friday (Oct. 2) stating that the Oct. 5 date is "not operative" and that the agency will continue its data collection operations through the end of the month, according to National Public Radio (NPR).

RESPOND to the Census online here. Additionally,  the Census Bureau will offer live, non-English help by phone between 7 a.m. – 2 a.m. ET.

Later Friday, the Census Bureau began complying with Koh's order. It updated its website to include the extension to the end of October.

The Census Bureau also said it sent out the mandated message Friday afternoon. "As a result of court orders, the October 5, 2020 target date is not operative, and data collection operations will continue through October 31, 2020," the message read. "Employees should continue to work diligently and enumerate as many people as possible. Contact your supervisor with any questions."

In response to Koh's order,  Julie Menin, Director of NYC Census 2020, and Executive Assistant Corporation Counsel, NYC Law Department issued a statement:

"The Trump Administration picked a fight with democracy and democracy won. We now expect the Census Bureau to fully comply with Judge Koh's order and not only inform every census employee that the census will continue until October 31, as it should have all along, but also ensure that this is the end to all legal shenanigans and the count actually continues until the end of the month. This is a victory for all of us and for the rule of law to ensure that everyone is counted. In NYC, we will continue our fight to ensure New Yorkers get every ounce of the money, power, and respect to which we are entitled."

The suit in National Urban League et al. v. Wilbur L. Ross Jr. et asks the court to keep the 2020 Census on the schedule proposed by census officials in April in response to Covid-19. Under that plan, the bureau would complete the census, including door-knocking, by October 31, 2020, and deliver apportionment numbers to the president by April 30, 2021. Redistricting data would be reported to the states by July 31, 2021.

Koh’s decision to extend the Census deadline means that the bureau will have more time to go to approach historically hard-to-count demographics -- such as predominantly immigrant or minority communities -- won’t be overlooked and produce an incomplete count, said attorneys for the plaintiffs after the ruling.

After field operations ends, the Bureau will begin crunching numbers to determine the number of congressional representatives will be needed per state and how many electoral votes each state will have.

Those opposed to the early deadline believed that immigrant-heavy states such as California and New York, would lose Congressional seats if those groups were undercounted. Instead of turning the numbers over to Trump on Dec. 31 for apportionment, the Bureau will not have to deliver the information until next Spring to whoever is President.

“Today’s decision is a victory for democracy. Census officials outlined an extended counting period in order to achieve the full enumeration of all people living in the United States," said plaintiff Virginia Kase, CEO, League of Women Voters of the United States. "The effort to rush the timeline set by our trusted census experts was a blatant attempt to force an undercount, deprive American communities of critical funding, and undermine the accuracy of our representative districts. The League now urges the American public to fill out the census and ask their friends and family to do the same. Our democracy depends on it.”

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. 

Appeals Court denies Trump administrations to end Census early ... for now

A federal appeals has denied today (Sept. 30) the Trump administration's request to temporarily block a lower court order that extends the 2020 census schedule.

The Census Bureau must continue counting as ordered by the lower court for now, according to the new ruling by 9th U.S. Circuit Judge Johnnie Rawlinson and Judge Morgan Christen, who were part of a three-judge panel. 

Dissenting was Circuit Judge Patrick Bumatay, a Filipino American who was one of the conservative judges rushed through the Senate by Senate Leader Mitch McConnell.

"Given the extraordinary importance of the census, it is imperative that the Bureau conduct the census in a manner that is most likely to produce a workable report in which the public can have confidence," wrote Rawlinson and Christen in their order. "The hasty and unexplained changes to the Bureau's operations contained in the Replan, created in just 4 to 5 days, risks undermining the Bureau's mission."

The ruling means that -- for now -- the Census must continue its efforts to count every resident of the United States until Oct. 31.

Monday one-sentence tweet by the Census Bureau that declared the Census field operations must end by Oct. 5 remains up in the air. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh believes that the bureau's internal memo may violate her court order issued last week that said that the Census would not have accurate and complete data if it stuck to the Sept. 30 deadline. 

Koh will hold a hearing regarding the Oct. 5 deadline this Friday, Oct. 2.

The U.S. Census timetable was thrown out the window when the coronavirus ended field operations last Spring. In order to have an accurate count, the Trump administration, the Census Bureau and community partners agreed to extend the orirginal deadline of Sept. 30 to Oct. 31 and to delay the formalization of the data unti Spring 2021. 

Then, without explanation, the Census Bureau announced in August that the bureau would end of field operations on Sept 31.

Several states and community organizations filed lawsuits to keep the Oct. 31 end date, one of which landed in Koh's court.

The data from the Census is used to allocated $1.5 trillion in social service funds and funding allocation of infrastructure projects. The head count also determines how congressional districts are drawn and how many Congressional representatives each state will have.

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. 

Gov't appeal wants to end the Census at the end of September

MinKwon Center for Community Action

MinKwon census outreach staff Fred Liu and Shiza Ranamagar hang Chinese and Korean
language posters at stores last month in Flushing, N.Y.

As expected, the Trump administration is appealing a federal court order that calls for extending the U.S. Census head count to Oct. 31, a month longer than the government's self-imposed Sept. 31 deadline. 

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in the Northern District of California issued her ruling late Thursday and this morning (Friday, Sept.25) the Justice Department filed a notice that it is appealing that order to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Appeals Court would have to issue a decision quickly with the government's plan to end the once-in-decade tally of who is living in the U.S. is next Tuesday, Sept. 30.

The government's action is the latest development in a federal lawsuit over the Trump administration's decision to shorten the timeline for the Constitution-mandated census.

The Census Bureau's own Census Scientific Advisory Committee made up of outside experts unanimously recommended that the Sept. 30 deadline be extended to "ensure a successful completion" in a way that's based on "scientific and methodological expertise."

"When the weather isn't right, we postpone the launching of rockets into space," the committee wrote in their recommendations for the bureau. "The same should be true of the decennial enumeration, the results of which will impact apportionment, redistricting, funding decisions, legal mandates and regulatory uses of decennial Census data over the next decade."

Plaintiffs, led by the National Urban League, are hoping an extension of the Census will improve the accuracy of the count.

"The coronavirus pandemic has set all of us back and created many challenges to get people counted, especially for rural areas such as the Navajo Nation," Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez said in a statement. "Today's ruling should be respected to allow the census count to continue without disruption."

According to NPR, "For the Black community, this decision means we have extra time to claim the governmental resources and representation that we've been denied," said Nana Gyamfi, executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, another plaintiff in the lawsuit.

JUDGE LUCY KOH

“The court’s decision affirms our contention that changes to the census schedule will irreparably harm the integrity of the 2020 Census and result in a devastating undercount of vulnerable communities,” said Marc H. Morial, the NUL’s president and chief executive, to the Washington Post. “Career officials at the Census Bureau opposed the shortened schedule precisely for these reasons, and to avoid the perception of political manipulation, and we are confident that integrity and equity will win out over the partisan vandalism that threatens our democracy.”

Meanwhile, a bipartisan Senate bill introduced this month by Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, would extend the count through at least Oct. 31 and extend the data reporting deadline by four months.

Census experts say post-count analysis and adjustments are key to an accurate count; the government’s Replan would have shortened it from six months to three months. A date extension approved by lawmakers could be vetoed by the president but still could add weight to challenges in court.

An undercount of hard-to-count communities, including the Black, Latino and AAPI communities, immigrants and undocumented Americans, would affect representation in Congress and local governments and affect disbursement of trillions of dollars in government assistance and social services, as well as the awarding of infrastructure projects in the cities, counties and states where large numbers of the hard-co-count communities reside.

The census also forms the sampling frame for thousands of surveys that impact decisionmaking over the next 10 years. All of these uses have long-term effects on public and private investments in communities—and particularly, communities of color.

The U.S. is undergoing a period of racial reckoning and the information from the Census is the basis for economic, social, marketing and business decisions.

Recent analyses show that the nation’s younger generations are the most racially diverse ever, with nonwhite racial groups accounting for more than half of all births and persons ages under 16. Because the white population is aging and declining in number among younger age groups, it is important that the 2020 census reflects the full diversity of the country’s youth. This will ensure that younger people of color and their families get their due in how political decisions are made, how funding gets allocated, and where schools, housing, hospitals, and employment sites are located. Investments in this young, diverse generation are critical for their—and the nation’s—future.

"We will all pay a huge price if they are undercounted in a flawed census," states an analysis from the nonpartisan Brookings Institute.

"If it isn’t stopped, the Trump administration’s last-ditch effort to hijack the 2020 census will have devastating, long-term consequences for the nation, especially its youth. Let us hope that Congress and the judicial system intervene in time to save this vital government institution."

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. 

Court: Census deadline extended to Oct. 31, but government appeal expected

CENSUS BUREAU

Census workers will continue to count people until the deadline, whenever that is.Add caption

A federal court has ordered the U.S. Census to extend by an extra month its self-imposed deadline that was supposed to be Sept. 30. However, the ruling by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in the Northern District of California, will most likely be appealed, leaving the final outcome up in the air for at least another few days.

The Census is being asked to extend its Sept. 30 deadline because the coronavirus and natural disasters such as the California wildfires and tropical storms hitting the Gulf states have thrown off the Census' timetable. Last Spring, the Census Bureau, the Trump administration and their community partners had agreed to extend the deadline to Oct. 31. 

With days to go, the U.S. Census and Asian American community groups are scrambling to make sure as many people as possible are included in the tally mandated by the Constitution.

The Census is being asked to extend its Sept. 30 deadline because the coronavirus and natural disasters such as the California wildfires and tropical storms hitting the Gulf states have thrown off the timetable. Last Spring, the Census Bureau, the Trump administration and their community partners had agreed to extend the deadline to Oct. 31. However, last month, the Census reverted to Sept. 30 as the end of the count.

"It is ludicrous to think we can complete 100% of the nation's data collection earlier than 10/31 and any thinking person who would believe we can deliver apportionment by 12/31 has either a mental deficiency or a political motivation," wrote Tim Olson, who oversees the enumerators who are going door-to-door to the households who have not self-reported online, phone or by mail.

The hearing Tuesday (Sept. 22) sometimes became testy as the government lawyers wanted to the judge to issue a ruling quickly so that they could file an appeal. However, Koh fired back that the government attorneys were the ones causing delays. She pointed out that the government's legal team violated two of her orders to produce documents, and even denied the existence of documents that it later turned over to the court.

Attorneys representing the National Urban League and other groups suing the government are asking for a preliminary injunction blocking the government from concluding the nationwide count on Sept. 30.

Koh signaled concern with sudden decision by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to move up the agreed-to deadline from October 31. She pointed out that it is unlikely the Census Bureau will  reach its goal of 99% response rate for completion by next week.

"Four out of 50 states reached the threshold for closing," she said, referencing the Census Bureau's latest data. "Why is the bureau insisting on ending data collection in seven days? ... That means 46 states have not met the requirements yet," according to CNN.

One of the government's arguments contended that the Constitution's requirement to conduct a count of the U.S. population every 10 years does not specify whether or how it should be accurate.

Census officials said that over 60% of the households have self-responded and that door-to-door Census workers pushed the rate to over 90% therefore, a deadline extension is not needed

However, those claims seem dubious with data provided by the Census. Minnesota is leading the country in self-response rates to the 2020 census while Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, is dead last, according to Census Bureau data.

Nearly 75% of Minnesota residents responded to the census by phone or mail or online, while just 34% of Puerto Rico residents self-responded.

The states or territories with the highest self-response percentage rates (as of Saturday) are:
Minnesota, 74.6 
Washington, 71.8 
Wisconsin 71.8 
Nebraska, 71.4 
Iowa, 70.8 
Michigan 70.8 
Illinois, 70.5 
Virginia, 70.5 
Utah, 70.4 
Maryland, 70.3 

The states or territories with the lowest self-response rates (as of Saturday) are:
Puerto Rico, 34.2
Alaska, 53.8
West Virginia, 55.9 
New Mexico, 57.3
Maine, 57.8 
Louisiana, 59.3 
Montana, 59.5 
Mississippi, 59.6 
Vermont 60.
South Carolina, 60.1
Arkansas, 60.1

The Census is not going well for New York City and Los Angeles, home to the country's largest immigrant communities. The count effort for NYC is at 60% and even worse for L.A. at 57.2%, far below the national average.

Census data is used to determine the number of members of Congress and who they would represent. The data is also used by government agencies to determine the allocation trillions of dollars of social service funds and infrastructure funds.

At the end of the hearing when she rendered her ruling, apparently exasperated at the the government attorneys' behavior, Koh said, "Go ahead and appeal me."

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.