The Trump administration is planning to ask the Supreme Court to review a lower court’s ruling that blocks the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census, according to a Justice Department filing released Tuesday.
The move comes a week after U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman, who presided over two New York-based lawsuits, issued the first major district court ruling on the legal battle over the citizenship question. More than two dozen states, cities and other groups have filed multiple lawsuits around the country to get the controversial question removed.
Critics of the question fear that it will result in an undercount of noncitizens, and any citizens living with them, who may be scared of disclosing their U.S. citizenship status in the current political climate. That could jeopardize the accuracy of population counts used to determine how congressional seats and Electoral College votes, as well as hundreds of billions in federal funding, are distributed among the states after the census.
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