The Trump administration has hit a new roadblock in its quest to exclude undocumented immigrants from being counted in census numbers for apportionment: The Census Bureau now says it will be unable to produce state population counts from the 2020 survey before President Trump leaves office on Jan. 20.
Bureau staffers told Commerce Department officials Wednesday that the data would not be ready until late January or possibly into February, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Since August, the bureau had been scrambling to finish the count and process the data in time for Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to deliver it to the president by the statutory deadline of Dec. 31. Last month, bureau officials said they were doing their best to produce the data as close to that date as possible, and internal documents have suggested they were aiming for early January. Delivering the numbers by the end of the year or early 2021 would mean condensing the normally five-month processing period down to around half that amount of time.
Read full article
