Jennifer Rodgers is a CNN Legal Analyst, a Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia Law School, and a former federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own; view more opinion articles at CNN.

(CNN) On Tuesday, Judge Jesse Furman ruled against the Trump administration and secretary of commerce Wilbur Ross's decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 US census questionnaire. (In the interests of transparency, Judge Furman and I were colleagues in the US Attorney's Office in Manhattan during his time there between 2004 and 2011.)

Jennifer Rodgers

In my view, Furman properly found the addition of the citizenship question to be unlawful as a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), ordering the question to be stricken from the census. While this is an important ruling that I believe is likely to be confirmed by higher courts, we are months away from the last word on the matter given the Trump Administration has said it plans to appeal the order.

This closely watched legal action was brought in federal district court in Manhattan by two groups of plaintiffs, comprises numerous states and municipalities and various civil rights organizations. Ross and the other government defendants contended that the addition of the citizenship question was at the request of the US Department of Justice for better data to enforce the Voting Rights Act. The plaintiffs, however, argued that the question -- which had not appeared on the census questionnaire since 1950 -- was added for political reasons, namely to discourage non-citizens from completing the census form, thereby disadvantaging their communities.

The plaintiffs' case appeared strong on the surface -- after all the census, which happens only every 10 years, is critical for determining how districts are drawn for elections and for allocating federal funding, and is meant to count all US residents, not merely citizens.