New York’s current response rate is 38th among the states, trailing the national average by more than 4% and New York City is behind by roughly 8%. Next week, Census Bureau workers will begin door-knocking operations. Still, its efforts will take on an additional urgency due to the recent announcement, despite the work being much more difficult due to COVID-19 and ramped up ICE enforcement sweeps. However, individuals can continue to complete the census questionnaire online at My 2020 Census.gov.
In response to the shortened deadline, Meeta Anand, Census 2020 Senior Fellow for the New York Immigration Coalition, issued the following statement:
“Condensing the time frame for Census door-knocking efforts, during a global pandemic, begs the question, are we witnessing gross incompetence or a concerted effort to manipulate the 2020 Census? When the New York Immigration Coalition took Trump to court over his clumsy attempt to tack a ‘Citizenship Question’ onto the U.S. Census, we quickly learned that the answer is both. Unfortunately, despite our success in eliminating the citizenship question from the 2020 Census, the Trump administration has succeeded in sowing confusion and creating a culture of fear in our communities regarding this vital count. The 2020 Census is far too critical to New York’s post-COVID-19 recovery to allow Trump to suppress our count and cheat New York of its fair share of federal funding and representation. That’s why we took him to court again over his attempts to do an end-run around the decided Citizenship Question, and it’s why we won’t stop fighting until every New Yorker is counted.”