As a bench trial opened Monday in a legal challenge to the inclusion of a question about immigration status on the 2020 U.S. census, the presiding judge had a pointed question early in the proceedings for one of the Trump administration lawyers defending the case.

Toward the end of her opening remarks, Justice Department attorney Carlotta Wells noted that U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross opted to include the question on the census in response to a request from DOJ about needing citizenship information to effectively protect the Voting Rights Act.

“My real question,” said Judge Richard Seeborg of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, “is whether you rise and fall on whether or not that's true: That that's the reason?”

Seeborg is overseeing two separate but related challenges brought by the state of California in one case and the city of San Jose and a nonprofit immigration organization in the other. He's the second federal judge to hold a trial on the matter after Judge Jesse Furman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York held a two-week trial late last year.

Plaintiffs in the California cases have claimed that Ross requested the DOJ recommendation as a pretext to make a change that he wanted despite requests from Census Bureau officials to leave the question off. Seeborg's question came just before the first witness took the stand in the bench trial, which is scheduled to run through the early part of next week.

Plaintiffs also claim that the citizenship question's addition violates the Administrative Procedure Act and that's its inclusion on the census will result in a significant undercount of immigrant communities, disproportionately affecting states and municipalities with significant Hispanic populations.

But on Monday the DOJ's Wells said that, even if the plaintiffs can show that Ross was operating on motives other than those stated, they still would not be able to show that including the question will lead directly to a “cognizable injury” for the plaintiffs, such as a lost Congressional seat or funding tied to the official population count.

“They will not be able to establish, as they must, each link in this claim,” Wells said.

The state and city are taking slightly different approaches to their Administrative Procedures Act claims. The city of San Jose and the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, which are represented by lawyers at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Public Counsel and Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, are limiting the evidence they will seek to introduce to prove its the APA claim simply to the administrative record. The state's lawyers at the California Department of Justice will seek to introduce further evidence gathered in discovery to bolster its APA claim.

“We are pragmatists,” said the Lawyers' Committee's Ezra Rosenberg, speaking on behalf of his clients. “This court is not the last stop on this train.”

“We are also aware that the case law does not favor the admission of extra-record material” in APA cases, said Rosenberg, adding that his clients didn't want to run the risk of getting a favorable decision only to see it reversed.

Census Bureau officials are set to send forms to the printer in June 2019, with or without the citizenship question.

Said Rosenberg: ”Time is of the essence, and there is not a lot of room for error here.”