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Trump Abandons Plan to Add Citizenship Question to 2020 Census
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July 11, 2019
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Jul 11, 201911:17Now PlayingPresident Donald Trump said he’s abandoned a plan to add a question about citizenship to the decennial census after a defeat at the Supreme Court, and will instead order government agencies to help the Commerce Department count the number of non-citizens in the country.
“We must have a reliable count of how many citizens, non-citizens and illegal aliens are in our country,” Trump said in a statement at the White House. Adding the question to the census was “delayed by meritless litigation,” he said, accusing Democrats of attempting to “conceal the number of illegal aliens in our midst.”
Instead of pursuing the matter further in court, Trump said he would direct every federal agency to provide records on the population’s citizenship status to the Commerce Department.
Cities, counties, states and immigrant-rights groups have challenged the Trump administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the census, fearing that the query could scare off immigrants and non-citizens from responding to the once-a-decade questionnaire. That would dilute the political power of areas home to many such people, as the results of the census are used to re-draw congressional districts and allocate billions of dollars in federal spending.
Trump’s political opponents say that’s the point, accusing the president of trying to use the census to bolster the political power of white voters and the Republican Party.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday that Trump sought to “make America white again.”
“They want to make sure that people, certain people, are counted,” Pelosi said at a press conference on election security. “It’s really disgraceful and it’s not what our founders had in mind.”
Pelosi said the goal of the Trump administration is “self-evident” to have “a chilling effect” on the response to the census.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had argued that the aim of the question was to help the Justice Department enforce the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voters. But in the final opinion of its term, a divided Supreme Court said June 27 that Ross’s rationale was “contrived” and couldn’t be squared with the evidence about his true motivations. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s liberals in the majority.
Trump announced Thursday’s news conference -- which didn’t appear on his official schedule for Thursday -- in a tweet previewing a social media summit at the White House.
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