Justice Dept. to Replace Lawyers in Census Citizenship Question Case

The Justice Department announced on Sunday that it was replacing the legal team defending the Trump administration’s effort to place a citizenship question on the next census, a change that is all but unprecedented in legal battles as consequential as the one over the 2020 head count.

The department said in a statement that it was “shifting these matters to a new team of Civil Division lawyers going forward.” It offered no explanation for the en masse change, which came on the heels of an extraordinary week in a yearlong clash over the issue that has raised concerns about whether the department’s arguments for adding the question could be believed.

And it strongly suggested that the department’s career lawyers had decided to quit a case that at the least seemed to lack a legal basis, and at most left them defending statements that could well turn out to be untrue.

“There is no reason they would be taken off that case unless they saw what was coming down the road and said, ‘I won’t sign my name to that,’” Justin Levitt, a former senior official in the Justice Department under President Barack Obama, said on Sunday.

Kerri Kupec, a department spokeswoman, cast the change in a positive light, saying in a statement that the lawyers had “given countless hours to defending the Commerce Department and have consistently demonstrated the highest professionalism, integrity and skill inside and outside the courtroom.”

Attorney General William P. Barr “appreciates that service,” she added, “and is confident that the new team will carry on in the same exemplary fashion.”

But according to a Justice Department lawyer who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, no lawyers from the department’s federal programs branch — which customarily defends the administration’s policies in court — would be working on the census issue. A senior official confirmed that federal programs was being taken off the case.