Judicial Watch Sues for Documents on Census Plan to Hire Foreign Nationals

Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Commerce for U.S. Census Bureau records concerning the agency’s hiring of non-U.S. citizens to help conduct the 2020 Census.

The lawsuit was filed after the Census Bureau delayed responding to a September 12, 2019, FOIA request for more than two months.

The request was prompted by a report entitled “Census Bureau Seeks to Hire Non-U.S. Citizens Ahead of 2020,” published on August 6, 2019 by U.S. News & World Report. Federal law generally prohibits the government from hiring of non-citizens, but according to the report, Census Bureau officials believe the law afford them “flexibilities”:

“There are [citizenship] flexibilities within the Appropriation Act that would permit, for example, based on language requirements, some exemptions,” says Tim Olson, associate director for field operations at the Census Bureau. “We are actively working through those flexibilities to see if they can be used in 2020. We are not there yet.”

Asked whether the bureau planned to employ people living in the country illegally [emphasis added], a spokesman said, “There is nowhere in our legal flexibilities that refers to people we could possibly hire as ‘’illegal.’” When pressed as to whether it’s an option under the current law, the spokesman repeatedly demurred, saying that the term “non-citizen” encompasses “anyone who is not a U.S. citizen.”

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