Department of Commerce v. New York

Department of Commerce v. New York
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued April 23, 2019 Decided June 27, 2019
Full case name	Department of Commerce, et al. v. New York, et al.
Docket no.	18-966
Citations	588 U.S. (more) 139 S. Ct. 2551; 204 L. Ed. 2d 978
Opinion announcement	Opinion announcement
Case history
Prior	New York v. Dept. of Commerce, No. 1:18-cv-02921, 351 F. Supp. 3d 502 (S.D.N.Y. 2019); cert. granted, 139 S. Ct. 953 (2019).
Holding
The Secretary of Commerce did not violate either the Enumeration Clause under the Constitution of the United States or the Census Act of 1790 by opting to reinstate a question on a person's status of citizenship to the 2020 census questionnaire, but the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York was warranted to remand the case from the judiciary to the bureaucratic agency where the evidence does not tell the same story as that of the Secretary of Commerce. Questioning the status of one's citizenship in the federal census is a reviewable action under the Administrative Procedures Act.
Court membership
Chief Justice John Roberts Associate Justices Clarence Thomas · Ruth Bader Ginsburg Stephen Breyer · Samuel Alito Sonia Sotomayor · Elena Kagan Neil Gorsuch · Brett Kavanaugh
Case opinions
Majority	Roberts, joined by unanimous (Parts I and II); Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh (Parts III, IV–B, and IV–C); Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh (Part IV–A); Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan (Part V)
Concur/dissent	Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, Kavanaugh
Concur/dissent	Breyer, joined by Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan
Concur/dissent	Alito

Department of Commerce v. New York, No. 18–966, 588 U.S. ___ (2019), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States dealing with the 2020 United States Census. The case concerned the decision of the United States Census Bureau under the Trump administration to include a question asking whether respondents are United States citizens or not, on the standard census questionnaire sent to all households. That question had been purposely omitted from this "short form" since the 1950 Census because officials and sociologists thought it would reduce participation in the census. It has been used on the "long form" American Community Survey sent to a subset of households and used for statistical estimation.

The Supreme Court case was a culmination of three separate cases decided between September 2018 and March 2019, with the earliest being heard under New York District Court Judge Jesse M. Furman. 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. Due to the urgency of printing the Census forms, the government expedited the case to the Supreme Court.

On June 27, 2019, the Court decided that the Enumeration clause allows for a citizenship question to be added.^[1] However, it also stated that such additions can be reviewed by courts under the Administrative Procedure Act, and judged that the administration's explanation for adding the question "appears to have been contrived" and was pretextual.^[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. Furman issued a final order in July 2019 barring the administration from adding the question to the 2020 Census or delaying the Census any further.