President Donald Trump continued pushing Thursday for including a citizenship question in the U.S. census, tweeting that the inquiry must be in the 2020 survey and noting that officials are spending the holiday working on the issue.
"So important for our Country that the very simple and basic 'Are you a Citizen of the United States?' question be allowed to be asked in the 2020 Census. Department of Commerce and the Department of Justice are working very hard on this, even on the 4th of July!" Trump wrote on Twitter.
The Supreme Court blocked the idea, at least temporarily, in a ruling last week concluding that the Trump administration provided a "contrived" rationale for including a citizenship question on the census. The White House followed that announcement this week by saying census forms were being printed without the question.
But on Wednesday, a lawyer for the Department of Justice said the administration is making another push for the citizenship question's inclusion.
Critics have called the citizenship question a Republican ploy to scare immigrants into not participating and engineer a population undercount in Democrat-leaning areas with high immigrant and Latino populations. They say that would benefit non-Hispanic whites and help Trump's fellow Republicans gain seats in the House of Representatives and state legislatures when new electoral district boundaries are drawn.
This report contains material from Reuters.
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