Two New Jobs, One Mission: Fighting the Trump Administration

NEW YORK — Julie Menin’s new titles in the Bill de Blasio administration are a 16-word mouthful: director of the census for New York City and executive assistant corporation counsel for strategic advocacy. Neither title says what her two new jobs are really about: fighting the Trump administration.

But Menin, who has been the director of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, sounded lawyerly in a 45-minute interview; she came across as measured, decorous, meticulous and assiduous. She mentioned the “Trump administration” a few times but nothing about the president.

She directed her fire, instead, at Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who has pressed for a citizenship question on the census. Opponents — and it should be said that city officials were among them long before Menin started her new assignments — maintained that Ross was carrying out a Republican agenda that is hostile to immigrants and minorities.

“When 38 percent of our city is made up of immigrants,” Menin said, “for there to be a citizenship question, we know what this is about.”

The latest round in the fight over the citizenship question ended Tuesday, when a federal judge in Manhattan ruled that Ross had broken “a veritable smorgasbord” of federal rules by insisting on including the citizenship question.

Ross had said the Trump administration needed citizenship information to be able to enforce federal voting rights laws. He also said the Justice Department had asked for the question. But emails and records in the case indicated that Ross had been hunting for a justification.

The judge, Jesse M. Furman, noted that experts had warned Ross that a citizenship question could affect the outcome of the census, because it would discourage noncitizens from responding. Even the Census Bureau had argued against asking about citizenship, estimating that at least 630,000 households would refuse to take part if the question was included.

“Judge Furman sent a loud and clear message that immigrant communities cannot be silenced and that a fair and equitable census is embedded in the Constitution and that we all have a right to demand it from the federal government,” Menin said. “Even by asking the citizenship question, it was a clear attempt to marginalize and disenfranchise immigrant communities.”

The Trump administration has appealed the decision. A Justice Department spokeswoman, Kelly Laco, said that Ross was “the only person with legal authority over the census.”

Laco also said that the government had “asked a citizenship question in the census for most of the last 200 years.” But Menin countered that the last time a citizenship question was part of the census was in 1950.

Some census experts worry that the 2020 head count will be affected even if the citizenship question is ultimately thrown out. “To some extent the damage has been done in making people skittish about filling out the form on their own or having to open the door to a government worker and provide information, said Steven Romalewski, who directs the mapping service at the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center.

So Menin’s census job will likely involve a lot of persuasion, like convincing community organizations to spread the word that the census is important and that New Yorkers’ answers to census questions will not be used against them. She envisions “microtargeted outreach and microtargeted advertising,” as well as close coordination with community groups and faith-based organizations.

“It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach because every community is different,” she said. “Every community has different concerns, and we have to make sure that our message is extremely focused.'’

But there are other census problems over which the city has little control. She does not have power over enumerators who will fan out across the city next year. That said, there will be less fanning out than in the past because the federal Census Bureau, which employs the census takers, wants 80 percent of the questionnaires to be answered online.

Romalewski said that could help with responses in some households but not in others. “At the very least, it’s new,” he said, “and the census is a onetime thing. If you don’t get it right, if you get it wrong, it hurts for a decade.”

In the short term, at least, Menin sees the online effort as “a value-added proposition” because during the six months between when the questionnaires become available and when they must be completed, city officials will be able to track where responses come from, something that was not possible in the past.

“We will indeed be able to see, in real time, oh, here’s a neighborhood, these are certain blocks where there’s no response or the response rate is incredibly low,” she said. “What do we need to do? We’ve got to get people in there immediately.”

Menin said her other job, in the corporation counsel’s office, would involve defending New York against federal actions that threaten cities generally and New York in particular.

Her appointment to the two posts came 11 months after Mayor Bill de Blasio promised in his 2018 State of the City address to appoint a census coordinator to oversee a public awareness campaign.

“The stakes literally couldn’t be higher,” Menin said.

The reason is money. She said the city receives the largest share of $53 billion in federal funds allocated to New York state. That amount is based on census data for everything from public housing to emergency preparedness to infrastructure.

Before going to City Hall, Menin was a former chairwoman of Community Board 1 in Lower Manhattan — she held the post during the unrest of Occupy Wall Street and the controversy surrounding the plan for an Islamic center and mosque near ground zero. She was also a founder of Wall Street Rising, which supported the rebuilding of the financial district following the Sept. 11, 2001 attack.

In her current job, at the office of media and entertainment, Menin was credited with helping to bring the Grammy Awards to New York City last year for the first time in more than a decade. Lately she has worked on a rescue plan to save the Drama Book Shop in the theater district, promising to find affordable space for the store after Lin-Manuel Miranda and three of his “Hamilton” collaborators bought it. It is moving out of its longtime space after a rent dispute.

For the last couple of years, besides her duties for the city, she has taught a class at Columbia University as an adjunct professor — “Cities Take the Lead.” The course description says it explores “the legal and regulatory framework” that cities can use when “federal and/or state government have determined not to act.”

Ester R. Fuchs, a professor of public affairs and political science at Columbia, remembered Menin as an undergraduate and consulted with Menin on the class she has been teaching.

“She is totally motivated and, I think, motivated for all the right reasons,” Fuchs said. “She’s passionate and she’ll get it done.”

Menin grew up in the Watergate complex in Washington. She was 4 years old when burglars were arrested at the Democratic National Committee’s offices there. “People talk about the break-in as if I could have seen it,” she said. “The number of people who said ‘Did you see the break-in?’ and I have to let them down and say no.”

She had a summer job in high school at — “of all places,” she said after a pause — the Commerce Department.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.