US official: 2020 census to end Oct. 5 despite court order
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross says the 2020 census
will end Oct. 5, despite a federal judge’s ruling last week allowing
the head count of every U.S. resident to continue through the end of
October, according to a tweet posted by the Census Bureau on Monday.
The
tweet said the ability for people to self-respond to the census
questionnaire and the door-knocking phase when census takers go to homes
that haven’t yet responded are targeted to end Oct. 5.
The
announcement came as a virtual hearing was being held in San Jose,
California, as a follow-up to U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh’s preliminary
injunction. 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 older Census Bureau plan in which the
timeline for ending field operations was Oct. 31.
The new Oct. 5
deadline doesn’t necessarily violate the judge’s order because the
injunction just suspended the Sept. 30 deadline for field operations, as
well as a Dec. 31 deadline the Census Bureau has for turning in figures
used for determining how many congressional seats each state gets in a
process known as apportionment. The census also is used to determine how
to distribute $1.5 trillion in federal spending annually.
Koh
asked federal government attorneys during Monday’s hearing to provide
documents on how the new decision to end the head count on Oct. 5 was
made. 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?”
Given the
judge’s preliminary injunction and a temporary restraining order she had
previously issued prohibiting the Census Bureau from winding down 2020
census operations, the decision was made that the Sept. 30 deadline was
no longer viable, said August Flentje, special counsel to the assistant
U.S. Attorney General.
“It’s day to day adjustments and assessments,” Flentje said.
Koh
said in her ruling last Thursday that the shortened schedule ordered by
President Donald Trump’s administration likely would produce inaccurate
results that would last a decade. She sided with civil rights groups
and local governments that had sued the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S.
Department of Commerce, which oversees the statistical agency, arguing
that minorities and others in hard-to-count communities would be missed
if the counting ends this month.
Attorneys for the federal
government said they were appealing the decision. During hearings,
federal government attorneys argued that the head count needed to end
Sept. 30 in order to meet a Dec. 31 deadline for handing in figures used
for apportionment.
Monday’s statement was noteworthy in that it
was solely attributed to the commerce secretary, while previous
announcements about census schedule changes had been made either by
Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham or both men jointly.
“It
is time that the Trump Administration stopped working to politicize and
jeopardize the 2020 Census,” said U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat
from New York, who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Reform,
which has oversight over the Census Bureau.
The decision by the
Commerce Department came as census takers across the U.S. told The
Associated Press that they were being pressured to meet the Sept. 30
deadline, even after Koh issued her injunction.
In upstate New
York, a census supervisor told her census takers Friday that the Buffalo
office was operating with Sept. 30 as the end date, according to a text
obtained by AP. “5 days left (no matter what the court status),” the
text said.
In northern California, a manager told supervisors
working under him on Sunday, “We’re in the home stretch with only 3 days
left,” according to an email obtained by AP.
In that same region,
a different manager told the census supervisors working underneath her
Monday that they needed to complete 99% of households in the the Santa
Rosa region by Wednesday, including 12,000 households yet to be counted
in Mendocino County. In the conference call, area manager Nicole
Terrazas pleaded with her supervisors to ask their census takers to head
to Mendocino County, even though that part of California is under
threat of wildfires.
“We need as much help as we can get. We only
have three days to do it,” said Terrazas on a call that an AP reporter
listened in on.
When a census supervisor asked why they were being
pressured with the Sept. 30 deadline when Koh’s preliminary injunction
prohibits the count from ending at the end of this month, Terrazas
called the judge’s order “something completely different.”
Other
census takers and supervisors, including one from Texas, have sent
emails to Koh’s court, saying that field operations in their areas are
slated to shut down Sept. 30.
In response to the pandemic, the
Census Bureau last April pushed back the deadline for ending the 2020
census from the end of July to the end of October. The bureau also asked
Congress to let it turn in numbers used for apportionment from the end
of December to the end of April.
The deadline extension passed
the Democratic-controlled House but it stalled in the
Republican-controlled Senate after President Donald Trump issued a
memorandum seeking to exclude people in the country illegally from being
used in the apportionment count. A panel of three judges in New York
said earlier this month that the memorandum was unlawful.