HuffPost Quotes Pratik Shah on Challenge to Census Citizenship Question
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Akin Gump Supreme Court and appellate practice co-head Pratik Shah has been quoted in the HuffPost article “Japanese American Incarceration Survivors, Muslim Group Oppose Census Citizenship Question.” The article reports on an amicus brief filed last week in the Supreme Court by a group of social justice organizations and individuals supporting a challenge to the inclusion of a citizenship question in the 2020 census.
In an effort to justify the inclusion of the question, the article reports that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the census does not collect specific enough data for the Department of Justice to enforce the Voting Rights Act. He also said there was little evidence that the citizenship question would decrease response rates and that the question was already well-tested.
Shah, who was part of the Akin Gump that served as lead pro bono counsel on the brief (click here to read more), disagreed. “The incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WW II shows that neither holds up: The government’s claims of national security threats proved false, and census data was exploited to facilitate the mass round-up. So ‘trust us’ is simply not a viable defense,” he said.
