(AP) – President Donald Trump is abandoning his effort to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census.
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.
Trump says he will sign an executive order to put this new plan into effect “immediately.”
Trump’s plan to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census was thwarted by a recent Supreme Court ruling on legal challenges to the effort.
Trump is giving an important endorsement to a change in the way electoral districts are drawn that would increase Republican political power.
Trump says citizenship data would help states that “may want to draw state and local legislative districts based upon the voter-eligible population.”
That would mark a change from how districts are drawn currently, based on the entire population.
Excluding children and non-citizens could shift political power from urban areas, where immigrants tend to cluster and Democrats are typically favored, to whiter, more rural Republican strongholds.
The issue is an open one at the Supreme Court and is likely to wind up there if states pursue it in the next round of redistricting after the census.
Attorney General William Barr, alongside President Trump in the White House Rose Garden, said he believes the administration had “ample justification” to inquire about citizenship status.
But Barr, who repeatedly congratulated Trump on the order, claimed there was no way “to implement any new decision without jeopardizing our ability to carry out the census.”
The government has already begun the lengthy and expensive process of printing the census questionnaire without the question on citizenship.
