Lawyers Who Beat Trump Team on Census Win $2.7 Million in Fees
Lawyers Who Beat Trump Team on Census Win $2.7 Million in Fees
(Bloomberg) -- The census case keeps coming back to haunt the Trump administration.
In the latest sting, the Justice Department last week quietly agreed to pay $2.7 million in fees and court costs for the lawyers who sued to block the government from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 survey, according to the terms of a nonpublic settlement agreement.
U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in January barred the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, from including the question -- “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” -- on the once-a-decade questionnaire. The U.S. unsuccessfully appealed to the Supreme Court. In July, President Donald Trump backed down from an earlier tweet that the government was “absolutely moving forward” with the question in spite of the rulings.
Then, on Aug. 2, a Justice Department lawyer signed off on the settlement to pay the New York Immigration Coalition, represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the law firm Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP. The deal avoids public litigation and the possibility of Furman ordering the government to pay more.
The NYIC’s lawyers told Furman last week that they’d resolved the issue with the government, without disclosing the amount of the settlement or providing the pact itself, which was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
U.S. law permits a party that wins in court to recover legal fees unless the government can show its position in the case was “substantially justified” or that there are other special circumstances that would make a fee award unjust.
Inga Sarda-Sorensen, an ACLU spokeswoman, and the Justice Department declined to comment on the agreement.
Despite the government’s surrender on the citizenship question, and now the fee deal, the case continues to go forward.
The NYIC is pursuing a request that Furman impose sanctions on the other side. It argues the government falsely claimed that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s object in adding the question was to help the Justice Department enforce the federal Voting Rights Act, when the true purpose was “suppressing the political power of minority immigrant communities.”
The census, mandated by the U.S. Constitution, is used in determining political representation and the flow of billions of dollars in government money. Cities, counties, states and immigrant-rights groups argued that any question about citizenship in a census administered by Trump’s government could scare off immigrants and noncitizens from responding, diluting their political power. Some fear that may already have happened, despite the government’s defeat in the courts.
While the case was pending in the Supreme Court, the NYIC said it learned of new evidence, in a separate suit in North Carolina, involving Republican consultant Thomas Hofeller, who died last August. Hofeller, an expert in political redistricting, concluded in a 2015 study that a citizenship question would depress census responses from Latino Americans and give more political power to Republicans and white voters.
The NYIC used the Hofeller information to claim that senior Commerce Department officials “repeatedly engaged in litigation conduct that is nothing less than a fraud on the court,” aided by lawyers from the Justice Department. “Defendants and their senior officials concealed facts about the case’s central issues through a concerted campaign of delay and obfuscation,” it alleged in a court filing.
The U.S. said the claims are nothing but “speculation and innuendo.”
In June, the Supreme Court ruled against allowing the citizenship question, calling the government’s stated reason for including it “contrived.”
The case is State of New York v. U.S. Department of Commerce, 18-cv-2921, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
To contact the reporter on this story: Bob Van Voris in federal court in Manhattan at rvanvoris@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey
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