This Week: Census Bureau Faces New Lawsuit Over Citizenship Data

A Sequel to the Census Citizenship Question Court Battle: A new legal fight over voting rights and the Census Bureau was launched Friday, with Latino groups suing to stop its plans to collect citizenship data via government records to be used for redistricting. Here’s what we know about the Bureau’s efforts so far: The government will release the citizenship data to states at the same time the redistricting file is put out in 2021. The citizenship data will be on a separate file from the redistricting file, but in a compatible format. The Bureau is giving itself until March 2020 to make final decisions about how the citizenship data will be put together and released. The new lawsuit argues that offering citizenship data for redistricting — i.e. drawing districts based on number of citizens rather than total population, which effectively drains immigrant communities of political representation — is unconstitutional and that the effort is also a violation of administrative law.…