Trump abandons bid to include citizenship question on census

WASHINGTON — 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 noncitizens 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.

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.

Trump’s efforts to add the question on the decennial census had drawn fury and backlash from critics who complained that it was political, meant to 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 his order would apply to every agency, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. The U.S. Census Bureau already has access to Social Security, food stamp and federal prison records, all of which contain citizenship information.

Trump, citing U.S. 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 contended.

But it is still unclear what Trump intends to do with the data. Federal law prohibits the use of census information to identify individuals, though that restriction has been breached in the past.