US Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration's Controversial Census Reduction Amid Minority Exclusion Debate

Deadline for On-site Investigation Changed from Late October to Late September... Permission Granted Without Disclosure of Judgment Reason
US Conducts Census Every 10 Years... Concerns Rise Over Exclusion of Minorities

Exterior view of the United States Supreme Court building [Image source=EPA Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Jeong Hyunjin] The U.S. Supreme Court has approved the Trump administration's plan to end the census early. Although there were concerns that the reduction in data collection would result in minority groups being omitted from the survey, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration's intention to complete the census process by the end of this year.

According to Bloomberg News and others on the 13th (local time), the Supreme Court suspended the lower court ruling that had blocked the plan to advance the census deadline and reduce data collection on the 10th. On the 24th of last month, Korean-American Judge Lucy Koh (51) of the San Jose District Court in California issued a preliminary injunction ordering the Census Bureau to continue the census as scheduled until October 31 and to delay the reporting of the results until the end of April next year, but this was overturned.

The Supreme Court reversed the lower court's decision and sided with the Trump administration. The specific reasons for the ruling were not stated in the decision document. Sonia Sotomayor, the only Supreme Court justice to publicly oppose this decision, stated, "The Census Bureau sacrificed accuracy for convenience. The harm derived from an inaccurate census is avoidable and also unacceptable." Sotomayor is the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice in U.S. judicial history and is considered progressive.

The United States conducts a census once every ten years. The census results are used to allocate seats in the U.S. House of Representatives by region and to determine the distribution of federal government subsidies to local governments, amounting to about $1.5 trillion (approximately 1719 trillion KRW) annually. The Census Bureau has announced that 99.9% of the total survey targets have responded so far.

This Supreme Court ruling is the conclusion of an emergency order issued by the U.S. Census Bureau in August to move the field survey deadline forward from the originally announced October 31 to September 30. The reason was that time was needed to organize the data to report the census results by the end of the year. Civic groups filed lawsuits, arguing that shortening the field survey period would omit minorities and others from the survey, reducing federal and state government support for them. In particular, they claimed that shortening the census schedule was an attempt to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census results.

In addition, this census has sparked various controversies. Last year, President Trump attempted to add a question about citizenship status to the survey, but the Supreme Court rejected it. At the time, the Trump administration argued it was to facilitate voting rights enforcement, but the Supreme Court rejected it due to insufficient grounds. However, President Trump announced last summer that he would submit census results to Congress excluding data on non-citizen immigrants.

The New York Times (NYT) criticized the Supreme Court decision as a measure that could allow the Census Bureau to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census results, stating, "The brief order without reasons is a typical characteristic of the Supreme Court's decisions on emergency applications."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.