Just one week after insisting that he was “absolutely moving forward,” US President Donald Trump on Thursday abandoned his effort to insert a citizenship question into next year’s census.
He directed federal agencies to try to compile the information using existing databases instead.
“It is essential that we have a clear breakdown of the number of citizens and noncitizens that make up the US populations,” Trump said in a Rose Garden announcement, insisting that he was “not backing down.”
However, the decision was clearly a reversal, after the US Supreme Court blocked his effort by disputing his administration’s rationale for demanding that census respondents declare whether they were citizens.
Trump last week said that he was “very seriously” considering an executive order to try to force the question.
However, 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 on Thursday said that he would be signing an executive order directing every federal department and agency to provide the US Department of Commerce with all records pertaining to the number of citizens and noncitizens in the country.
Late on Thursday, US Department of Justice lawyers sent a copy of the executive order to the judge presiding over a challenge to the citizenship question in Manhattan federal court, saying that they would confer with lawyers for the plaintiffs to see how to proceed in the case.
Trump’s order said that the Supreme Court “has now made it impossible, as a practical matter, to include a citizenship question on the 2020 decennial census questionnaire.”
“After examining every possible alternative, the attorney general and the secretary of commerce have informed me that the logistics and timing for carrying out the census, combined with delays from continuing litigation, leave no practical mechanism for including the question on the 2020 decennial census,” Trump said.
Trump’s efforts to add the question on the decennial census had drawn fury and backlash from critics, who complained that it would discourage participation, not only by people living in the country illegally, but also by citizens who fear that participating would expose noncitizen family members to repercussions.
Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project and the lawyer who argued the Supreme Court case, celebrated Thursday’s announcement by the president, saying: “Trump’s attempt to weaponize the census ends not with a bang, but a whimper.”
Trump said that his order would apply to every agency, including the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Social Security Administration.
The US Census Bureau already has access to social security, food stamp and federal prison records, all of which contain citizenship information.
Trump, citing Census Bureau projections, predicted that using previously available records, the administration could determine the citizenship of 90 percent 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 said.
However, it is still unclear what Trump intends to do with the citizenship information.
Federal law prohibits the use of census information to identify individuals, although that restriction has been breached in the past.
The executive order’s text states that “generating accurate data concerning the total number of citizens, noncitizens and illegal aliens in the country has nothing to do with enforcing immigration laws against particular individuals,” and that information would be used “solely to produce statistics” and would not be used to “bring immigration enforcement actions against particular individuals.”
Still, it requests extensive and detailed information, including national-level files of all lawful permanent residents; US Customs and Border Protection arrival and departure data; and Social Security Administration master beneficiary records.
Civil rights groups said that the president’s efforts had already sown fear and discord in vulnerable communities, making the task of an accurate count even harder.
“The damage has already been done,” said Lizette Escobedo of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund.
The Census Bureau had stressed repeatedly that it could produce better citizenship data without adding the question and had recommended combining information from the annual American Community Survey with records held by other federal agencies that already include citizenship records.
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