Trump: Officials worked on census dispute during holiday
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said administration officials were working on Independence Day in hopes of finding a way to have the 2020 census include a citizenship question even though the government has begun printing the questionnaire without it.
“So important for our Country that the very simple and basic ‘Are you a Citizen of the United States?’ question be allowed to be asked in the 2020 Census,” Trump said in his first tweet on the holiday.
Trump’s administration has faced numerous roadblocks to adding the question, including last week’s Supreme Court ruling that blocked its inclusion, at least temporarily. The Justice Department had insisted to the Supreme Court that it needed the matter resolved by the end of June because of a deadline to begin printing census forms and other materials.
But on Wednesday, department officials told a federal judge in Maryland they believed there could be a way to meet Trump’s demands.
“There may be a legally available path,” Assistant Attorney General Joseph Hunt told U.S. District Judge George Hazel during a conference call with parties to one of three census lawsuits. The call was closed to reporters; a transcript was made available soon after.
A department spokeswoman had confirmed on Tuesday that there would be “no citizenship question on the 2020 census” amid signs that the administration was ending the legal fight. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement that day that the “Census Bureau has started the process of printing the decennial questionnaires without the question.”
It was a Trump tweet on Wednesday — “We are absolutely moving forward” — that sowed enough confusion that Hazel and U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman, overseeing a census lawsuit in New York, demanded clarification.
“I don’t know how many federal judges have Twitter accounts, but I happen to be one of them, and I follow the President, and so I saw a tweet that directly contradicted the position” that a Justice Department lawyer took in a hearing Tuesday, Hazel said.
Fear and confusion among immigrants might just be the Republican president’s aim, a lawyer for opponents of the question said, because the Census Bureau’s own experts have said asking about citizenship would depress participation by immigrants and people who are in the country illegally.
“The President’s tweet has some of the same effects that the addition of the question would in the first place and some of the same effects on the 18-month battle that was just waged over the citizenship question,” MexicanAmerican Legal Defense Fund lawyer Denise Hulett said. “It leaves the immigrant communities to believe that the Government is still after information that could endanger them.”
In the short term, work on the census probably won’t be affected. The company with a $114 million contract to print census questionnaires had been instructed to start printing forms without the citizenship question.