(Slip Opinion) OCTOBER TERM, 2018 1 Syllabus NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued. The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader. See United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 200 U. S. 321, 337. SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES Syllabus DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE ET AL. v. NEW YORK ET AL. CERTIORARI BEFORE JUDGMENT TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SECOND CIRCUIT No. 18–966. Argued April 23, 2019—Decided June 27, 2019 In order to apportion congressional representatives among the States, the Constitution requires an “Enumeration” of the population every 10 years, to be made “in such Manner” as Congress “shall by Law di- rect,” Art. I, §2, cl. 3; Amdt. 14, §2. In the Census Act, Congress del- egated to the Secretary of Commerce the task of conducting the de- cennial census “in such form and content as he may determine.” 13 U. S. C. §141(a). The Secretary is aided by the Census Bureau, a sta- tistical agency in the Department of Commerce. The population count is also used to allocate federal funds to the States and to draw electoral districts. The census additionally serves as a means of col- lecting demographic information used for a variety of purposes. There have been 23 decennial censuses since 1790. All but one be- tween 1820 and 2000 asked at least some of the population about their citizenship or place of birth. The question was asked of all households until 1950, and was asked of a fraction of the population on an alternative long-form questionnaire between 1960 and 2000. In 2010, the citizenship question was moved from the census to the American Community Survey, which is sent each year to a small sample of households. In March 2018, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross announced in a memo that he had decided to reinstate a citizenship question on the 2020 census questionnaire at the request of the Department of Jus- tice (DOJ), which sought census block level citizenship data to use in enforcing the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The Secretary’s memo ex- plained that the Census Bureau initially analyzed, and the Secretary considered, three possible courses of action before he chose a fourth option that combined two of the proposed options: reinstate a citizen- 2 DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE v. NEW YORK Syllabus ship question on the decennial census, and use administrative rec- ords from other agencies, e.g., the Social Security Administration, to provide additional citizenship data. The Secretary “carefully consid- ered” the possibility that reinstating a citizenship question would de- press the response rate, the long history of the citizenship question on the census, and several other factors before concluding that “the need for accurate citizenship data and the limited burden of the ques- tion” outweighed fears about a lower response ...
Original document
Source: All recent Immigration Decisions In All the U.S. Courts of Appeals