Catherine Pugh, the Mayor of Baltimore, spent her weekend at the US Conference of Mayor’s annual meeting in Boston. She was given the duty of chairing a task force to fight the plan by the Trump administration to ask respondents on the US Census about their immigration status in the US.
Pugh says they have joined the lawsuit to try and prevent citizenship questions on the Census because the point of the Census is to count every person in the US. The US Conference of Mayors, which is bipartisan, joined a coalition of six cities and 18 attorney generals to file a lawsuit over the issue back in April. They argued that asking respondents about their legal immigration status would decrease the number of responses received from states that have a large population of immigrants, resulting in residents being under-reported and potentially losing federal government funding for healthcare, infrastructure, education and more in cities, such as Baltimore, and states, including Maryland.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, filed in the District Court for New York’s Southern District, argue that there is a constitutional obligation on the part of the Census Bureau to find out the number of people in every state and that demanding information about citizenship status would depress the number.
Pugh, who returned to Baltimore on Monday, says that the task force she is leading passed a resolution to support the lawsuit over the course of the weekend.