Trump administration seeks to dismiss MALDEF lawsuit over Census citizenship question

It’s hard to keep all these Census lawsuits straight.

As multiple court fights over the addition of a citizenship question to the once-a-decade census heat up, the Trump administration is working to keep several Texas groups representing Latino and Asian residents on the sidelines.

In a late Friday filing, attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice asked a Maryland-based federal judge to toss a lawsuit filed by the Mexican American Legislative Caucus and the Texas Senate Hispanic Caucus — among other Texas-based organizations — that’s meant to block the controversial question from appearing on the census questionnaire in 2020.

Those groups allege that the addition of the citizenship question is unconstitutional because it will lead to a disproportionate undercount of Latino and Asian residents, non-citizens and their family members. Justice Department lawyers responded by challenging the plaintiffs’ standing to dispute the federal government’s decision to ask about citizenship status, and they argued it was unlikely the plaintiffs would be able to prove that the question would be harmful to them.

“The relief sought in this suit — an order barring the Secretary of Commerce from collecting demographic information through the decennial census — is as extraordinary as it is unprecedented,” the Justice Department attorneys wrote in the filing.

[…]

Throughout the almost 100 pages of legal briefs filed with the court on Friday, attorneys for the Trump administration sought to undermine those undercount concerns, repeatedly describing them as “too attenuated and speculative” to provide those challenging the inclusion of the question with firm legal standing.

A drop in responses and the alleged potential fallout “would be not be fairly traceable to the Secretary’s decision but would be attributable instead to the independent decisions of individuals who disregard their legal duty to respond to the census,” they wrote.

The Trump administration hasn’t had much success in fending of legal challenges to the citizenship question. As of this week, judges have greenlighted five federal lawsuits despite the administration’s objections.

[…]

In its Friday response, the Trump administration put forth several of the same arguments it presented in the Maryland suit [U.S. District Judge George] Hazel already ruled could move forward and even offered a rebuttal to what DOJ lawyers described as the judge’s “misguided” analysis.

See here for more on this lawsuit. In addition to the one in Maryland noted in the story, the lawsuit in New York was allowed to proceed as well. Given that the plaintiffs have discretion over where they file, you’d think that would bode well for this one as well.

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