White House gives up census question fight

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration, abruptly switching course, decided Tuesday to give up its fight to add a question about citizenship to next year’s census.

The decision was an unusual retreat by the administration on a high visibility, highly partisan issue and a major victory for civil rights groups and states that had challenged the administration in court.

Administration officials had tried for more than a year to get the question added to the census, taking their argument to the Supreme Court. President Donald Trump, as recently as Monday, had repeated his insistence that doing so was necessary.

Although the administration lost 5-4 in the Supreme Court last week, the decision by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. had given them an opening to try again, and conservative lawyers and advocacy groups had lobbied hard for the Justice Department to do so.

Democrats had argued that adding a question on citizenship would have been a partisan ploy to reduce minority participation in the census. Officials in California and other states, as well as neutral experts, warned the question would discourage many people from responding to the census and therefore result in an undercount of immigrants.

That could cost some states billions in federal funds and shift congressional districts from California and other states with large numbers of immigrants to those with fewer.

Word of the decision to give up the fight came initially in an email from a Justice Department attorney to lawyers who had challenged the administration in court. The email announced the decision to begin printing census forms without the controversial question.

A Justice Department spokesperson subsequently confirmed the decision.

In a statement, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose agency oversees the Census Bureau, said he still disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision. But, he added, “the Census Bureau has started the process of printing the decennial questionnaires without the question. My focus, and that of the Bureau and the entire Department, is to conduct a complete and accurate census.”

After the Supreme Court’s decision, in which Roberts said that Ross had not provided an honest answer for why he wanted to add the citizenship question, Trump had publicly called for delaying the census.

Monday, he had repeated his belief that the question was critical.