A jobseeker holds an information packet during a U.S. Census Bureau 2020 job opportunities workshop at a senior center on Roosevelt Island in New York, last month. A jobseeker holds an information packet during a U.S. Census Bureau 2020 job opportunities workshop at a senior center on Roosevelt Island in New York last month. Photo: David ‘Dee’ Delgado/Bloomberg

Law firm Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the New York Civil Liberties said in a filing late Friday that they’ve reached a settlement with the Trump administration over attorney fees and other costs related to litigation over a citizenship question on the 2020 U.S. Census.

They were expected to file a motion for attorney fees and costs associated with the litigation Friday, but wrote in a filing that they’d reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice instead.

“Plaintiffs … write to inform the Court that they have reached a settlement with Defendants resolving their claim for any fees, costs, and expenses relating to this action and therefore will not be filing a motion for fees or bill of costs today as previously contemplated,” the one-page filing said.

Attorneys involved in the case declined to provide details on the settlement Friday evening.

Arnold & Porter has been working with the ACLU and NYCLU since early last year to represent a coalition of immigrant rights groups in the litigation. They filed suit last June against the citizenship question.

They represented the New York Immigration Coalition, Casa de Maryland, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, ADC Research Institute, and Make the Road New York.

Their case quickly escalated over the past year, first being combined with a separate lawsuit from the New York Attorney General’s Office on the same matter for trial. That proceeding was before U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York in Manhattan.

Furman handed down several orders in the case that complicated the litigation, largely in favor of Arnold & Porter, the ACLU, and NYCLU. He allowed them to pursue extra-record discovery in the case last year, including a handful of depositions of officials within the Trump administration on the genesis of the question.

Their case culminated in a trial over the citizenship question in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District last November. Furman, in a decision handed down in January, blocked the Trump administration from asking about citizenship on the census. He was the first federal judge to do so.

The decision was appealed, and mostly leapfrogged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year. The high court said it was skeptical in its decision in June of the Trump administration’s reasoning for wanting to ask about citizenship on the census, and blocked the federal government from doing so.

Attorneys with Arnold & Porter have continued to be involved in the case as they, along with the ACLU and NYCLU, move to impose sanctions on the U.S. Department of Justice over the alleged false testimony of two witnesses about the origin of the citizenship question.

Attorneys from Arnold & Porter who are involved in the case include Ada Añon, Andrew Bauer, Sam Callahan, John Freedman, David Gersch, Peter Grossi, Daniel Jacobson, R. Stanton Jones, Caroline Kelly, Christine Lao-Scott, Chase Raines, Eric Rubel, Elisabeth Theodore, David Weiner, Robert Weiner, Barbara Wootton, and Dylan Young.

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