What is the US citizenship question?

The US Department of Justice has announced a shake-up of its team of lawyers handling 2020 census-related cases, amid an ongoing legal battle over a citizenship question that Donald Trump wants added to the upcoming national survey.

The move comes after the Supreme Court last month blocked an initial attempt by the president to alter the census forms to ask: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?”

Why is Trump pushing the new question?

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In March 2018, the Justice Department said that the current level of census data is “insufficient in scope, detail and certainty” about the voting age population. The Trump administrations claims more information about eligible voters is needed to help enforce protections for minority voters under the federal Voting Rights Act, according to the Pew Research Center, a Washington D.C.-based think-tank.

The results of the census are used to apportion hundreds of billions of dollars for federal services such as education and policing, as well as allotting seats in the US House of Representatives.

“I think it’s totally ridiculous that we would have a census without asking,” Trump told reporters last month. “I think when the census goes out, you should find out whether or not - and you have the right to ask whether or not - somebody is a citizen of the United States.”

However, civil rights groups and some US states have objected to the proposal.

Campaigners claim the new question is a “Republican ploy to scare immigrants into not participating in the census”, leading to a population undercount in Democratic-leaning areas with a high number of immigrants, says The Guardian.

An estimated 22 million people living in the US are non-citizens.

Why was it rejected by the Supreme Court?

On 27 June, the Supreme Court effectively blocked the new question, rejecting the rationale behind its introduction.

The Justice Department initially appeared to accept this verdict but then said that it would continue to push for the change, before announcing this week that a new legal team would be tackling the issue.

On Friday, Trump told reporters: “We’re working on a lot of things, including an executive order.”

What happens next?

The president’s persistence has prompted George Hazel, a federal judge in Maryland, to move forward with a case that claims the administration intends to disciminate against immigrant communities of colour by adding the question, reports the National Public Radio (NPR) news site.

Earlier this year, it emerged that an unpublished 2015 study by the late GOP political strategist Thomas Hofeller argued that asking a citizenship question on the census would redraw Congressional districts in a way that “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites”.

“Court filings show that some of Hofeller’s work on this issue made its way into the Justice Department’s citizenship request - some of it word-for-word. The Justice Department has denied the link,” says CNN.

Now, as the Trump administration “prolongs the legal fight to add a citizenship question to the census, more evidence may be revealed in court about how and exactly why the administration tried to include it”, adds NPR.