U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned his controversial bid to inject a citizenship question into next year’s census Thursday, instead directing federal agencies to try to compile the information using existing databases.
He insisted he was “not backing down,” declaring in a Rose Garden announcement that the goal was simple and reasonable: “a clear breakdown of the number of citizens and non-citizens that make up the United States population.”
But the decision was clearly a reversal, after the Supreme Court blocked his effort by disputing his administration’s rationale for demanding that census respondents declare whether or not they were citizens. Trump had said last week that he was “very seriously” considering an executive order to try to force the question. But the government has already begun the lengthy and expensive process of printing the census questionnaire without it, and such a move would surely have drawn an immediate legal challenge.
Instead, Trump said Thursday that he would be signing an executive order directing every federal department and agency to provide the Commerce Department with all records pertaining to the number of citizens and noncitizens in the country.

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Trump, citing Census Bureau projections, predicted that using previously available records, the administration could determine the citizenship of 90 per cent of the population “or more.”“Ultimately this will allow us to have a more complete count of citizens than through asking the single question alone,” he contended.But it is still unclear what Trump intends to do with the citizenship information. Federal law prohibits the use of census information to identify individuals, though that restriction has been breached in the past.WATCH: Trump administration ‘determined’ to win fight on census citizenship question
READ MORE: 2020 U.S. Census to be printed without addition of citizenship question
The Census Bureau had stressed repeatedly that it could produce better citizenship data without adding the question.In fact, the bureau had recommended combining information from the annual American Community Survey with records held by other federal agencies that already include citizenship records.“This would result in higher quality data produced at lower cost,” deputy Census Bureau Director Ron Jarmin had written in a December 2017 email to a Justice Department official.WATCH: Dept. of Justice has path to putting citizenship question on census, Barr says
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Trump’s administration had faced numerous roadblocks to adding the question, beginning with the ruling by the Supreme Court temporarily barring its inclusion on the grounds that the government’s justification was insufficient. Two federal judges also rejected the Justice Department’s plan to replace the legal team fighting for inclusion.But Trump insisted his administration was pushing forward anyway, publicly contradicting government lawyers and his commerce secretary, who had previously conceded the case was closed, as well as the Census Bureau, which had started the process of printing the 2020 questionnaire without the controversial query after the Supreme Court decision.As he has many times before, Trump exploded the situation with a tweet, calling reports that the fight was over “FAKE!”WATCH: Trump on census – Citizenship question has ‘been on that thing’ before
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“You need it for Congress, for districting. You need it for appropriations. Where are the funds going? How many people are there? Are they citizens? Are they not citizens? You need it for many reasons,” he told reporters last week, despite the fact that congressional districts are based on total population, regardless of residents’ national origin or immigration status.If immigrants are undercounted, Democrats fear that would pull money and political power away from Democratic-led cities where immigrants tend to cluster, and shift it to whiter, rural areas where Republicans do well.Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday accused Trump of pushing the question “to intimidate minorities, particularly Latinos, from answering the census so that it undercounts those communities and Republicans can redraw congressional districts to their advantage.”He later called Trump’s move a “retreat” that “was long overdue and is a significant victory for democracy and fair representation.”
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