US Supreme Court halts census in latest legal twist

The United States Supreme Court has decided to stop the once-a-decade headcount of every US resident from continuing through the end of October, in a blow to civil rights groups concerned about an undercount particularly of racial minorities. The justices put on hold a lower court ruling that had ordered that the decennial population count be continued until October 31. The US Census Bureau on August 3 announced that it would wind down data collection by September 30, a month earlier than originally scheduled. President Donald Trump’s administration had asked the nation’s high court to suspend the district court’s order permitting the 2020 census to continue through the end of the month. The Trump administration argued that the headcount needed to end immediately so that the Census Bureau had enough time to crunch the numbers before a congressionally mandated year-end deadline for turning in figures used for deciding how many congressional seats each state gets. A coalition of local governments and civil rights groups had sued the Trump administration, arguing that minorities and others in hard-to-count communities would be missed if the count ended early. They said the census schedule was cut short to accommodate a July order from Trump that would exclude people in the country illegally from the numbers used to decide how many congressional seats each state gets. style="width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0; bottom: 0; right: 0; left: 0;">