Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross appears to have misled Congress when he testified that the Justice Department had "initiated" including a question about U.S. citizenship on the U.S. census, according to newly unredacted documents released Monday as part of a lawsuit. Ross said in March that the Justice Department had pushed for the citizenship question, which hasn't been included in the census since 1950, so it could enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The new documents add to the evidence that Ross was the driving force.

In a September 2017 email to Ross, Commerce official Earl Comstock said he had approached the Justice Department in May to "discuss the citizenship question," and "Justice staff did not want to raise the question given the difficulties Justice was encountering in the press at the time (the whole Comey matter)." Comstock said he then tried the Department of Homeland Security, and they pointed him back to the Justice Department, so he asked a Commerce Department lawyer to explore "how Commerce could add the question to the census itself." A few months later, the Justice Department formally requested the citizenship question.

The Census Bureau's chief scientist, other researchers, and a bureau-sponsored marketing campaign have found that including the citizenship question depresses the participation of Latinos, Asians, and other minorities, skewing the constitutionally mandated decennial head count. Ross "personally lobbied the attorney general to submit the memorandum that the secretary 'then later relied on to justify his decision,'" plaintiffs' lawyers argued in the lawsuit, one of six around the country seeking to strike the citizenship question.

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman, who's overseeing the lawsuit in Manhattan, had ordered the Trump administration to release the unredacted memos, saying they "go to the heart" of the central question of Ross' intent in adding the citizenship question. Furman has potentially scheduled a trial to start Nov. 5, though Justice Department lawyers are arguing against a trial and Ross deposition. Peter Weber

The Satanic Temple of Chicago wanted to install a holiday-themed "Snaketivity" sculpture in the Illinois capitol building in Springfield, and state allowed them to "because of that pesky First Amendment," Jimmy Kimmel said on Tuesday's Kimmel Live. "Religious leaders are understandably upset that something from the Church of Satan is in the building, and of course when things like this happen, I go directly to the top — I don't mess around. And in this case, that is God. So, God are you there?"

Not only was God (Billy Crystal) there, but so was Satan (Dave Grohl). "Me and Satan, we're cool," Crystal said, explaining why he doesn't support removing the sculpture. "We made up. Hey listen, folks, if Taylor Swift and Katy Perry can make up, why can't we?" You can watch God and Satan banter, hear about their brunch and Fortnite reunions, and see them play rock-scissors-paper over Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) below. Peter Weber

The Trump administration is still holding more than 14,600 migrant children at 137 government-funded shelters around the U.S., but that number could soon drop by hundreds of detainees under a policy shift at the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS's Office of Refugee Resettlement is in charge of sheltering minors traveling by themselves or, especially under President Trump's officially defunct family separation policy, removed from their parents at the border. Going forward, that office will no longer fingerprint and run full background checks on all adults in a household that wants to sponsor a separated minor, only the sponsors themselves and any other adult who is flagged in a public-records check.

Most sponsors are a parent or relative of the detained child. "The children should be home with their parents," Lynn Johnson, assistant secretary at HHS's Administration for Children and Families, told NPR on Tuesday. "The government makes lousy parents." The extra screening "is not adding anything to the protection or the safety of the children," she added. "I don't want to cause any additional harm by keeping kids in care any longer than they need to when they have a thoroughly vetted parent waiting for them." Johnson said about 2,000 children are ready to be released to vetted parents before Christmas.

The policy shift was driven in part by pragmatic concerns: The ACLU and other groups sued HHS last month over the extra background checks, and the 137 federal facilities are 91 percent full, most notoriously the massive Tornillo tent city in West Texas. Migrant advocates cheered the change — with caveats. For example, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested 170 immigrants who applied to sponsor a migrant child, and HHS isn't ending its information-sharing agreement with ICE. "Rather than prioritizing the well-being and safety of children, the Trump administration continues to use them as bait to round up and deport their family members," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in a statement. Peter Weber

Who said shipwrecks can't be festive?

Wearing Santa hats, a group of divers recently decided to spread some holiday cheer 137 feet underwater, making their way to the MS Zenobia shipwreck off the coast of Cyprus. A Swedish cargo ship, the Zenobia capsized in 1980 on its maiden voyage. No one was hurt in the incident, but more than 100 tractor trailers on board went down with the vessel.

The divers chose a white tree for the shipwreck, and decorated it with nontoxic ornaments that will not disintegrate in the ocean. It's likely that many people will celebrate Christmas under the sea, as the Zenobia attracts thousands of divers every year. Catherine Garcia

Fox News host Tucker Carlson is predictable, in that every night he uses his platform to "demonize immigrants," "spread false information," and "spread the president's lies," CNN's Don Lemon said Tuesday night.

Last Thursday, Carlson said migrants make "our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided." Since then, more than a dozen companies have pulled their ads from his show. While discussing the matter with Lemon, CNN's Chris Cuomo was incredulous that Carlson would be "talking about human beings that way." While he ordinarily wouldn't air "hateful speech," Cuomo said, it's "important for people to see what someone's trying to pass off as news."

Lemon was careful to say that he normally doesn't like to criticize colleagues, even though "if you turn on Fox any night, it's the CNN, MSNBC criticism channel," likely because "we're actually talking about real news." Carlson is an opinion journalist who is exploiting the immigration issue for ratings, Lemon said, and the facts are that "studies show immigration has and continues to make this country a better, stronger, more productive and vibrant country."

The hosts both derided Carlson for using his platform to sow division, but said what he's doing is nothing new. When such blatant hate speech is on display, Cuomo said, "we need to call it out because it needs to stop." Watch the video below. Catherine Garcia

"I tell you, I'm beginning to think Donald Trump destroys everyone he touches," Stephen Colbert mused on Tuesday's Late Show. "He is like the King Midas of crap," and "the latest Trump aide to hit the fan" is former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Flynn was in court Tuesday to be sentenced for lying to the FBI, and President Trump "was on the sidelines, cheering him on," Colbert said, reading the relevant tweet, which he suggested amounted to "witness tampering in real time."

Flynn's lawyers argued last week that the FBI tricked him into lying by not telling him lying to the FBI is a crime, and the judge at the sentencing hearing, Emmet Sullivan, asked why he pleaded guilty, then. "Over and over, the judge asks Flynn, Do you really want to do this?" Colbert paraphrased. "He's like a tattoo artist at 2 a.m. with a drunk customer who keeps saying, 'No, I'm sure I want my whole back covered with a picture of Tweety Bird puking on Calvin.'" Judge Sullivan was less understanding when it came to Flynn's lobbying work for Turkey, and he told him so in no uncertain terms.

"Probably not a great sign when you're not charged with treason but the judge really wants to know why not," Colbert reasoned. After hinting at treasonous actions, Sullivan asked Flynn if he wanted to postpone his sentencing so he could try to lessen his punishment by cooperating more with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. "That's a tough call — that's like choosing between apples and decades in prison," Colbert explained. (Flynn chose the apples.) He ended with Trump's baffling personal war on Christmas, a holiday he reportedly doesn't like because it's not about him: "How self-obsessed can you get? I'd say he's Scrooge, but Trump would probably enjoy a visit from those ghosts." Watch below. Peter Weber

More than 150 companies, including major tech organizations and online retailers, made arrangements with Facebook to have special access to users' personal data, even as the social media platform assured people that they had control over their own data, The New York Times reports.

The Times reviewed more than 270 pages of documents Facebook generated in 2017 to track the partnerships, and spoke with more than 50 former employees of the company and its corporate partners. Under the arrangement, partners were essentially exempt from the usual privacy rules, the Times reports. For example, Netflix and Spotify were granted permission to read users' private messages; Amazon was able to obtain the contact information of users through their friends; and Bing, the Microsoft search engine, was allowed to "see the names of virtually all Facebook users' friends without consent," the Times says.

The records show the that deals, all of them active in 2017, involved the data of hundreds of millions of users every month. The first deals were made in 2010. Steve Satterfield, Facebook's director of privacy and public policy, told the Times these partnerships did not violate the privacy of users or run afoul of the Federal Trade Commission's 2011 consent agreement that prohibited Facebook from sharing user data without permission. Read more about the arrangements — and why data privacy experts are skeptical of Facebook's claim that these partnerships were exempt from regulatory requirements — at The New York Times. Catherine Garcia