The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted the Trump administration’s request to stop the 2020 census from continuing through the end of October.
The administration had asked the nation’s highest court to suspend an order from a federal judge in California last month that allowed the once-a-decade head count of every US resident to continue until Oct. 31.
The Census Bureau argued that it wanted to halt the count so that it could begin crunching the numbers to meet a Dec. 31 deadline for turning in the results, used for deciding how many congressional seats each state gets.
Civil rights groups and local governments had sued the feds, arguing that minorities and others in hard-to-count communities would be missed if the process ended early.
Last month, US District Judge Lucy Koh in California sided with the plaintiffs and ordered the government to continue with its field work until Oct. 31.
But the Supreme Court stayed that order in an unsigned decision, as is typical for emergency cases.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, writing that “meeting the deadline at the expense of the accuracy of the census is not a cost worth paying.”
“The Government has failed to show why it could not bear the lesser cost of expending more resources to meet the deadline or continuing its prior efforts to seek an extension from Congress,” Sotomayor wrote.
With Post wires
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