Instead, Trump says he's ordering every federal department and agency to provide the Commerce Department with all records it requests pertaining to the number of citizens and noncitizens in the country.

A new team of Civil Division lawyers at the Department of Justice will take over handling 2020 census-related cases, a spokeswoman for the agency said on Sunday.

President Trump insisted Wednesday that he is not dropping efforts to include a citizenship question on the upcoming 2020 census, even as the U.S. Census Bureau has started the process of printing the questionnaire without it.