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

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Judicial Watch

(Washington, DC) – 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 (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Commerce (No. 1:19-cv-03433)).

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

• Records about the temporary hiring of non-citizens to help conduct the 2020 decennial census.
• Records relating to efforts to ensure any such hires are permanent, legal U.S. residents.

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.”