Ross v. Nat'l Urban League

Ross v. Nat'l Urban League

Opinion

 [*18]   [**169]  Application for stay presented to Justice Kagan and by her referred to the Court granted. The district court’s September 24, 2020 order granting a preliminary injunction is stayed pending disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition of the petition for writ of certiorari, if such writ is timely sought. Should the petition for writ of certiorari be denied, this stay shall terminate automatically. In the event the petition for writ of certiorari is granted,  [**170]  the stay shall terminate upon the sending down of the judgment of this Court.

Dissent by: SOTOMAYOR

Dissent

Justice Sotomayor, dissenting from grant of stay.

Today, the Court stays a preliminary injunction requiring the Census Bureau to follow the data collection plan the agency once described as necessary to avoid “risking significant impacts on data quality.” Electronic Case Filing in No. 5:20-cv-5799, Doc. 198-7 (ND Cal., Sept. 22, 2020), p. 131 (ECF). The injunction required the Bureau to continue its data collection efforts  [*19]  until October 31, 2020, a deadline the Bureau itself selected in response [***2]  to the significant operational disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Government now claims that this Court’s immediate intervention is necessary because, absent a stay, the Bureau will not be able to meet the December 31 statutory deadline for reporting census results to the President. This representation is contrary to the Government’s repeated assertions to the courts below that it could not meet the statutory deadline under any circumstances. Moreover, meeting the deadline at the expense of the accuracy of the census is not a cost worth paying, especially when the Government has failed to show why it could not bear the lesser cost of expending more resources to meet the deadline or continuing its prior efforts to seek an extension from Congress. This Court normally does not grant extraordinary relief on such a painfully disproportionate balance of harms.

In April 2020, the Bureau extended the deadline for self-responses to the census questionnaire and for its NonResponse Follow-Up field operation from July 31, 2020, to October 31, 2020. In the words of the Bureau’s associate director for field operations, it was “ludicrous” to expect the Bureau to “complete 100% of the [***3]  nation’s data collection earlier than [October 31]” in the middle of a pandemic. ___ F. Supp. 3d ___, ___, 2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 176965, 2020 WL 5739144, *6 (ND Cal., Sept. 24, 2020).

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