Greenbelt, Md. • A federal trial began Tuesday for lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census, a plan that a different court blocked last week.
Former U.S. Census Bureau director John Thompson, the first plaintiffs' witness for the bench trial in Maryland, testified Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross disregarded "long established" Census Bureau protocols in adding the citizenship question. Thompson, who oversaw the bureau from 2013 through June 2017, said he doesn't think officials properly tested the question for the 2020 census.
The trial before U.S. District Judge George Hazel in Greenbelt, Maryland, began one week after a federal judge in New York barred the Trump administration from adding a citizenship question to the census for the first time since 1950.