‘Irreparable harm’: Anger as Supreme Court allows Trump administration to immediately end 2020 census

The Supreme Court says Donald Trump can immediately shut down the 2020 census count.

The high court’s ruling suspended a lower court order that required the Trump administration to run the census until 31 October.

The Census Bureau argued that it needed to end the census early in order to hit a 31 December legal deadline to report back to the president.

The government had been ordered by the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals to continue its national head count until the end of the month.

But on Tuesday the Supreme Court suspended the appeal court’s order after an emergency filing from the Department of Justice.

"The harms caused by rushing this year's census count are irreparable,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissenting opinion.

“Moreover, meeting the deadline at the expense of the accuracy of the census is not a cost worth paying, especially when the government has failed to show why it could not bear the lesser cost of expending more resources to meet the deadline or continuing its prior efforts to seek an extension from Congress."

The Census Bureau reported on Tuesday that it had accounted for 99.9 per cent of housing units in the US.

The latest population count in the US, which is carried out every 10 years, will be used to determine each state’s share of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives.

Those numbers are then used to calculate the number of electoral College votes each state will receive in the 2024 presidential election.

The president is trying to remove undocumented immigrants from the count, which have been included since the first count in 1790.

The Supreme Court is still deciding if it will hear an appeal from the Trump administration after a lower court blocked them from leaving them out of the count.