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John Gore, Acting Chief of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, speaks at a press conference in Charlottesville in June. Gore leads the division that says it needs the citizenship question of the 2020 census to better protect

Steve Helber / AP

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Steve Helber / AP

John Gore, Acting Chief of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, speaks at a press conference in Charlottesville in June. Gore leads the division that says it needs the citizenship question of the 2020 census to better protect

Steve Helber / AP

A justice department official, John Gore, must be questioned by lawyers for the lawsuits over the citizenship issue his department asked to add to the 2020 census, ruled a jury of three judges.

In a notice issued hours after hearing oral arguments on Tuesday, the three judges wrote: "We find no abuse of discretion in the district court's decision that the deputy acting Attorney General's evidence is warranted."

This latest development comes as the first potential trial approaches the question of citizenship. The Trump administration faces a total of six lawsuits across the country by dozens of states, cities, and other groups who want the citizenship issue to be removed from the forms for the next national account. A potential lawsuit for the two New York-based cases is expected to begin on November 5, while trials in California and Maryland could begin in January.

Lawyers from the Department of Justice represent the Census Bureau and the Commerce Department, which oversees the census, in a legal battle that may extend into the final months of preparation for the 2020 census.

Preparation for potential trials

Plaintiffs' lawyers are attempting to gather evidence from the testimony of Trump administration officials and internal documents to substantiate their case before the October 12 deadline for discovery in New York-based trials.

Last week, Furman ordered the administration to make the sworn interrogation available to Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, who approved the addition of the citizenship issue. Department of Justice lawyers should also ask the 2nd Circuit to block Ross's testimony.

The appeals court temporarily suspended Gore's testimony, originally scheduled for Sept. 12, while she was reviewing the Justice Department's request to block it. The new decision confirms a lower court ruling by US District Judge Jesse Furman. At the request of the plaintiffs, Furman ordered the Department of Justice in August to put Gore at the disposal of the statement after concluding that he "possessed relevant information that can not be obtained from any other source ".

Show "bad faith"?

Gore is the Acting Chief of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, who would need answers to a question about American citizenship to better protect racial and linguistic minorities from discrimination. In December 2017, the Department of Justice submitted its response request to the Census Bureau. Ross approved the application in March, resulting in multiple lawsuits.

The complainants contend that the federal government does not need a citizenship issue on the census to enforce section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Since the adoption of the law in 1965, the federal government has used estimates of citizens drawn from a survey conducted by the Census Bureau, now known as the American Community Survey , to apply it.

Census Bureau research suggests that the current political climate, characterized by growing anti-immigrant rhetoric and increased immigration enforcement under the Trump administration, could discourage households with non-citizens from participating in the process. This, in turn, could affect the accuracy of the national enumeration, which is used to determine the number of congressional seats and the number of votes obtained by each constituency.

The complainants argue that Ross's decision to add the question constituted a misuse of his discretion in the census and was intended to discriminate against communities of color of immigrants.

Furman had previously found that the plaintiffs had argued that the Trump administration had displayed "bad faith" on the basis of internal memos and e-mails issued by the Commerce Department as part of the lawsuits. These contradict Ross's testimony in Congress that the Department of Justice "initiated" the application and that the Commerce Department's "consideration of the citizenship issue" "only responded" to the department's request. of Justice.

In fact, Ross disclosed in a June memo that months before the Department of Justice sent his application, he and his staff had "asked if the Department of Justice would support and, if so, would request Execution of voting rights When a representative of the Department of Commerce addressed the issue in May 2017, officials at the Department of Justice "did not want to raise the issue," according to a recently written part of an internal memo addressed to Ross.

Finally, the Department of Justice sent the census office the December 2017 letter asking for a citizenship question, which the plaintiffs' lawyers state in a recent Gore "ghostwrote" judgment.