While the Census Bureau stated that the question was requested by the Justice Department to assist in enforcing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, lower courts have found that explanation to be pretense.
Additionally, many state and city officials have raised concerns that inclusion of the question would significantly depress response rates, which in turn would reduce the quality of census data, which is used, in part, to draw redistricting maps, which influence the results of future elections.
[2] Unable to meet certain legal deadlines when the case was remanded to the District Court, the Trump administration announced it would instead issue an Executive Order to collect existing data from the Department of Commerce to tally immigration numbers.
[4] Separate analyses, made from a combination of surveys and Census Bureau estimates over the past few years, show that the addition of the citizenship question is likely to lead to an undercount of approximately 5.8-5.9% of Hispanics and undocumented immigrants.
This led to Judge Jesse M. Furman of the district court to request the government set aside time for Ross for a deposition in September 2018, prior to the planned start of the trial in November 2018.
[9] A few days later, the Supreme Court stated they would no longer hear the oral arguments related to the deposition issue, but did not rule out reviewing the case at a later time.
The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on February 15, 2019, fast-tracking it to hold oral arguments in April 2019 allowing them to rule on the matters by the end of term.
[12] On March 15, 2019, the Supreme Court ordered both sides in the New York case to prepare to discuss the potential constitutionality of the question in light of Seeborg's decision.
The conservative Justices also believed that laws relating to the content of the census were deferent to the decisions made by the Secretary of Commerce, so Ross was in his authority to add the question regardless of its origins.
[15][16] In late May 2019, following oral arguments but before the Court gave its decisions, The New York Times published documents recovered from a hard drive owned by Thomas B. Hofeller, a political strategist for the Republican party who died in August 2018.
The documents indicated that Hofeller may have had a significant role in framing the need for the citizenship question, driven by the Republican goal of partisan gerrymandering to assure long-term control of Congress and state legislative bodies.
[17] The American Civil Liberties Union filed a motion in light of this evidence, asserting that assistants to Ross obfuscated Hofeller's role in how the question was added.
[2] Roberts was joined by the four liberal Justices, Ginsburg, Kagan, Breyer, and Sotomayor, in affirming the District Court's injunction against adding the question until Commerce is able to provide a satisfactory explanation.
[25] On failure to replace the legal team, Trump announced on July 11, 2019, he had instructed the DOJ to no longer seek action on the census question, and instead issued Executive Order 13880 to request that the Department of Commerce provide the administration with all the data it had on citizenship and immigration status.
[31] The new emails showed stronger evidence that Hofeller had worked closely with Mark Neuman, the administration's former adviser on the census, for the immigration questions than previously established.