LINC has been sharing updates on the lagging effort to complete the U.S. Census count in the Kansas City area on our Census page, and the excerpt LINC captures (below, right) from the Census map on response rate shows how far behind much of Kansas City’s central city is in this important count. As the NPR report below indicates, the counting process may be in its final days.

By Hansi Lo Wang, NPR

The Trump administration can end counting for the 2020 census early after the Supreme Court approved a request to suspend a lower court order that extended the count's schedule.

The high court's order on Tuesday, following an emergency request the Justice Department made last week, helps clear the way for President Trump to try to alter the count while in office by excluding unauthorized immigrants from the numbers used to reallocate congressional seats and Electoral College votes for the next 10 years.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the lone dissenter from the unsigned court order.

Hours after the ruling was released, the Census Bureau announced it will keep accepting responses online at My2020Census.gov through Oct. 15 until 11:59 p.m. Hawaii time. The bureau has also set Oct. 15 as the postmark deadline for paper forms, as well as the end date for collecting phone responses and door knocking at unresponsive households.

In a statement, Kristen Clarke of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, one of the attorneys who helped bring the lawsuit to extend the census schedule, noted that the order "will result in irreversible damage" despite the challengers' efforts to "secure more time on the clock to achieve a fair and accurate count."

Read the complete NPR report here.