Last week, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced he would sue the Trump Administration over its plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S. Census. Today, he and other AGs officially filed that case and five cities are joining the fight.
Seattle, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Providence are plaintiffs in the case filed against the Census Department today.
“Donald Trump and his administration wants to take the Census back to the 1950s with an unreasonable, unjust and unconstitutional proposal,” Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan said in a statement.
Demographers, including some people inside the Census Bureau, worry a question about citizenship could discourage immigrants from participating, threatening the accuracy of the census.
Durkan said today an inaccurate count in Seattle could mean the city loses “billions of dollars of federal investments in housing, schools, and hospitals, and other critical federal resources.” According to the mayor’s office, Washington State received $13.7 billion in federal dollars through programs administered using Census data in 2015. Population estimates also help determine how the state allocates money to cities and counties.
The legal complaint filed today says an inaccurate count will jeopardize federal funding and “deprive historically marginalized immigrant communities of critical public and private resources over the next ten years.”
The suit argues that because the Constitution requires an accurate population count in order to apportion political representation, discouraging participation in the count is unconstitutional. The complaint also says the risks of the question are “heightened in the current political climate because of President Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and this Administration’s pattern of policies and actions that target immigrant communities.”
A citizenship question will worsen “this unprecedented level of anxiety in immigrant communities,” the complaint says. The complaint also alleges the Census Bureau failed to sufficiently test the question.
According to the complaint, more than 20 percent of Washington State households did not mail back their 2010 Census questionnaire, which meant the Census Bureau had to do followup with those households in person. About one in seven Washington residents is an immigrant, according to the complaint, and in 2014 more than a quarter of Washington immigrants was undocumented. Seattle’s immigrant population grew by 20 percent from 2000 to 2014, according to the complaint, and immigrants now make up 18 percent of the city’s population.
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