U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

A federal judge in Manhattan has denied a request from the U.S. Department of Justice to remove a series of attorneys from litigation over the Trump administration's efforts to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 U.S. Census.

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York wrote in a three-page decision that he had to deny a motion for nine attorneys to withdraw from the lawsuit because the federal government hadn't given a reason for the change.

“Defendants' motion is patently deficient,” Furman wrote. “Defendants provide no reasons, let alone 'satisfactory reasons,' for the substitution of counsel.”

He was referring to a section of the rules governing federal courts, in which it's required for any attorney seeking to leave a lawsuit to submit an “affidavit or otherwise of satisfactory reasons for withdrawal or displacement and the posture of the case.”

Furman left the door open for the DOJ to submit a new filing explaining why it was planning to switch up the legal team handling the census litigation. He said that as long as the new filing provided a reason for the shakeup, he would consider the request.

Two of the federal government's attorneys were allowed to leave the lawsuit, but only because they no longer worked at the division of the DOJ handling the census litigation.

The decision was in response to a series of filings submitted by the Trump administration on Monday in various federal courts seeking to change its legal team handling litigation over the citizenship question. Three new attorneys from the DOJ were added to the litigation in New York, while 11 others were seeking to leave.

Those three attorneys are David Morrell, Daniel Schiffer and Christopher Reimer. Others have also been included on filings in litigation outside New York. Morrell, deputy assistant attorney general of the civil division, is leading the team.

The planned change comes after attorneys from the Trump administration said both during a telephone conference with a federal judge and on filings in various jurisdictions last week that they were still considering asking about citizenship on the 2020 U.S. Census.

That's despite a decision last month from the U.S. Supreme Court, which questioned the motive of the federal government for wanting to add the question to the survey.

That ruling was interpreted as barring the Trump administration from asking about citizenship on the census, at least for now. But Trump has hinted at some sort of executive action that he claimed could allow him to skirt the high court's order and include the question.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr said Monday that the Trump administration will act at some point in the coming days to add the question, according to an interview with The Associated Press. Barr told the AP that the DOJ had developed a way to ask about citizenship on the census that they've interpreted to be lawful, though he didn't provide details.

Among the attorneys slated to leave the census litigation are Kate Bailey, who led the Trump administration's team in the New York litigation, and Joshua Gardner, who gave no indication on a conference call with a federal judge last week that he was planning to exit the lawsuit.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is leading a coalition of states in the census litigation in New York, which is in the Southern District. A separate lawsuit from the New York Immigration Coalition was combined with James' lawsuit for trial last year. That group is represented by the New York Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union and Arnold & Porter.

They've argued that asking about citizenship on the census would lower turnout for the survey in areas with high immigrant populations like New York. That could lead to a population undercount, they claimed, which could have resulted in fewer seats in Congress for those states. It could have also meant less federal funding in areas like education and health care.

The team had litigated the citizenship question for the better part of last year, into this year, with the challenge traveling quickly from the trial court to the U.S. Supreme Court in a matter of months.

A spokeswoman for the DOJ declined to comment on Furman's decision Tuesday evening.

Read the decision:

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