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The New York State Catholic Conference, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, and Catholic Charities Brooklyn and Queens are calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold a lower court ruling blocking a proposed question on citizenship from appearing on the 2020 U.S. Census.
The Catholic entities, joining with other religious and secular human services organizations, filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief supporting a lawsuit brought by New York and several other states and entities against the United States Department of Commerce. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the case April 23 following a favorable decision for the plaintiffs in federal district court in the Southern District of New York in January, which the government has appealed.
In the brief, the organizations argue that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross Jr.’s decision to add a citizenship question violated the law because he failed to report to Congress well in advance of the census that he intended to do so. This failure, the brief argued, violates the separation of powers and “has a pernicious anti-democratic effect.”
They also argue that the decision to add the citizenship question “will undoubtedly cause a severe undercount of non-citizen and Hispanic households” that would result in harm that “is hard to exaggerate,” both to the human services organizations and to individuals they serve.
Because of the presumed undercounting, states like New York would see an “unwarranted reduction in and reallocation of governmental funding” from federal programs that distribute funds based on census data, the brief argues.
