A federal judge on Monday suggested that the proposal for a question about citizenship on the 2020 census may have had a “discriminatory purpose,” TalkingPointsMemo reports.
U.S. District Judge George Hazel of Maryland ruled last week that a case on the citizenship question can be reopened based on new evidence that “potentially connects the dots between a discriminatory purpose” and the citizenship question, the judge wrote in his opinion Monday.
Civil rights groups that sued the government over the question asked Hazel to reconsider his previous ruling after the discovery of the new evidence: files on the hard drives of late Republican strategist Thomas Hofeller. Hofeller reportedly had among his files a secret study he conducted in 2015, in which he found that excluding noncitizens from the census count when drawing districts would improve the numbers for Republican and non-Hispanic whites. This study also concluded that a citizenship question would be needed for this to happen.
“Plaintiffs’ new evidence potentially connects the dots between a discriminatory purpose —diluting Hispanics’ political power — and [Commerce Secretary Wilbur] Ross’s decision” to request a citizenship question, the judge wrote.
“As more puzzle pieces are placed on the mat, a disturbing picture of the decision makers’ motives takes shape,” Hazel said, adding that it’s “becoming difficult to avoid seeing that which is increasingly clear.”
The judge noted that the files show a “possible, if not likely, conclusion that the decision makers adopted Dr. Hofeller’s discriminatory purpose for adding the citizenship question.”
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