As a federal judge considers whether the Trump administration violated her order for the 2020 census to continue through October by setting an Oct. 5 end date, her court has been flooded with messages from census takers who say they are being asked to cut corners and finish their work early.
Josh Harkin, a census taker in northern California, said in an email Tuesday to the court that he had been instructed to finish up by Wednesday, even though his region in the Santa Rosa area still had 17,000 homes to count.
Please do something to help us! We really need to go until the end of October to have a chance at a reasonable count for our communities,” Harkin wrote.
Paul Costa, a census taker in California currently working in Las Vegas, said in an email to U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh on Tuesday that census takers were being pressured to close cases quickly, if not at all…
