WASHINGTON (AP) – Just a week after insisting that he was “absolutely moving forward,” President Donald Trump has abandoned his effort to insert a citizenship question into next year’s census.
Instead, he directed federal agencies to try to compile the information using existing databases. The president said it is essential to have a clear breakdown of the number of citizens and non-citizens that make up the U.S. population. The decision was clearly a reversal, after the Supreme Court blocked his effort by disputing his administration’s rationale for demanding that census respondents declare whether or not they were citizens. Trump wanted to pursue that effort, but the administration said that census deadlines made it impossible.