President Trump has dropped a fight to put a citizenship question on the upcoming 2020 census. This comes after the Supreme Court made a decision last month effectively barring the administration from adding such a question to the census, as it had planned to do.
However, the President will issue an executive order that will require federal agencies to give the Commerce Department all the records they have that are related to how many citizens and non-citizens are living in the United States.
Attorney General William Barr said the question will not be asked on the census, acknowledging that a recent Supreme Court ruling had made doing so difficult, if not impossible.
“We’re not going to jeopardize our ability to carry out the census,” Barr said.
Trump defended his original plan to have the question asked, and claimed that his order directing agencies to share citizenship data would make the actual count of non-citizen “far more accurate” than it would have been if the question was on the census.
Source: WSJ