Trump to Drop Effort to Add Citizenship Question to 2020 Census

President Donald Trump will retreat from his effort to include a citizenship question in the decennial census after a defeat at the Supreme Court, and will seek the information through other means, an administration official said.
The official said the Commerce Department, which manages the census, would be directed to figure out how to obtain the data.
“The president wants to know who’s in this country lawfully and who isn’t,” a White House spokesman, Hogan Gidley, told reporters on Thursday in advance of Trump’s remarks. He will do everything “in his legal authority” to find out, Gidley said.
ABC News reported earlier that Trump had decided to back down from adding a question about citizenship to the census itself. The American Community Survey, a set of questions the Census Bureau asks of a sample of the U.S. population every year, already includes a citizenship query.
Cities, counties, states and immigrant-rights groups have challenged the Trump administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the census, fearing that the query could scare off immigrants and non-citizens from responding to the once-a-decade questionnaire. That would dilute the political power of areas home to many such people, as the results of the census are used to re-draw congressional districts and allocate billions of dollars in federal spending.
Trump’s political opponents say that’s the point, accusing the president of trying to use the census to bolster the political power of white voters and the Republican Party.

The executive action is expected to be announced at a 5 p.m. news conference in Washington, according to three people familiar with Trump’s plan. They declined to detail the action, but indicated it may not be an executive order.
The people, who asked not to be identified because the plan isn’t yet public, said details were still fluid.
Trump announced the news conference -- which didn’t appear on his official schedule for Thursday -- in a tweet previewing a social media summit at the White House.

 
Trump “is pushing everyone in the White House and the Department of Justice to find all the various ways he can” move ahead with plans to ask people their citizenship status as part of next year’s census, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Acting Director Ken Cuccinelli said Wednesday.
A June 27 Supreme Court ruling put on hold the administration’s initial plan to include a citizenship question. The forms for the once-a-decade headcount must be prepared soon to meet the deadline for 2020.
The administration initially appeared to accept the Supreme Court decision and began printing census forms that did not include the question. But Trump subsequently ordered the government to re-examine the issue in a tweet, prompting the Justice Department to explore alternatives.
Census-takers started asking about citizenship in 1820 but haven’t posed the question to every household since 1950.