A Manhattan federal judge in a ruling Thursday sanctioned the Trump administration for failing to produce documents in litigation that led to a proposed citizenship question being removed for the 2020 census.

U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman of the Southern District of New York declined to order additional discovery, finding that a coalition of states and nongovernmental organizations had already succeeded in the case.

Furman last year granted a preliminary injunction barring the question, which the plaintiffs argued would deter participation in immigrant communities for fear of how the federal government would use the information. The U.S. Supreme Court later upheld the ruling, finding that  Secretary of Commerce Wilbur L. Ross Jr.'s stated reasons for including the question had been "pretextual" and "contrived."

But while the case was before the high court, the plaintiffs obtained evidence suggesting that Ross' true motivation in adding the question may have been to benefit "Republicans and non-Hispanic whites" electorally. That revelation was followed by another batch of previously undisclosed documents that the administration said it had "inadvertently" failed to produce.

Furman on Wednesday ordered the administration to pay attorney fees and costs stemming from its lapse, but the judge declined to impose sanctions for the NGO plaintiffs' most serious allegations that two witnesses—Mark Neuman, an outside adviser to Ross, and John Gore, then the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice—had provided false testimony in the case.

"To be clear, that conclusion is not based on a finding that Plaintiffs' troubling allegations are wrong; the court intimates no view on that question," Furman wrote in a 23-page opinion. "Instead, the conclusion is based primarily on the fact that, even if plaintiffs' allegations are accurate, that would not have changed the outcome of this litigation."

Furman acknowledged that the allegations in the sanctions motion were "troubling," but said it was not the court's role to act as an "investigative body charged with government oversight."

"There are actual oversight bodies better suited to the task of investigating and evaluating the process that led to Secretary Ross's decision—most notably, Congress," Furman wrote.

"Put simply, the needs of the case have changed," he said. "Discovery serves the goals of litigation, not the other way around."

A spokeswoman for the DOJ, which represented the administration, declined to comment. An attorney for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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