There will be no citizenship question on the 2020 Census forms.
The Justice Department announced Tuesday that the forms will be printed without the question, apparently ending a dispute going back to March 2018 when Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said he planned to add one to next year’s survey.
Ross’s statement triggered a flurry of lawsuits from states, cities and civil rights groups seeking to block the question, most on constitutional grounds.
Critics of the question, including some inside the Census Bureau, say it could cause an undercount of millions of people in immigrant communities who would be afraid to return the form, “leading to an inaccurate that could skew representation and apportionment in favor of Republican areas,” reports the Washington Post.
After hearing arguments about the citizenship question in April, last week the Supreme Court called Ross’s reasoning “contrived” and “incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency’s priorities and decision-making process.”
Many thought that should have ended it, but President Trump reacted by saying he wanted to delay the census, hoping that administration officials could come up with a better excuse for including the question.
That could have taken months — and further put off printing hundreds of millions of copies of the form. The Commerce Department had already missed its own Monday deadline for starting the printing process.
Opponents of the question were jubilant.
“This is a victory on the eve of the Fourth of July we are celebrating equal justice for all. Everyone should be counted,” CNN quoted New York Attorney General Letitia James as saying.
As stipulated by the Constitution, the U.S. has conducted a national head-count every 10 years since 1790.
“Data from the census, which every U.S. household is required to fill out, is used by businesses and by the government to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars in federal spending per year; it is also used to determine Congressional apportionment and redistricting,” says the Post.
