Trump contemplates issuing executive order to add citizenship question to 2020 census

(Image credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

published 5 July 2019

Before heading to New Jersey for the weekend, President Trump told reporters on Friday morning that he is "thinking of" issuing an executive order to ensure that a citizenship question is included in the 2020 census.

Trump said he is considering several options to get the question added, despite the Supreme Court ruling against his administration last week and the Department of Justice announcing on Tuesday it was dropping the effort. "We'll see what happens," Trump said. "We could start the printing now and maybe do an addendum after we get a positive decision. So, we're working on a lot of things, including an executive order."

Critics say including the question could cause some immigrants to not fill out the form, which in turn would result in less federal funding to some communities, while experts told The Washington Post an addendum would most likely violate the Census Bureau's rules on testing out questions. After the government said it was ending its fight to get the question on the census, Trump tweeted that the battle wasn't over at all, and a senior White House official told the Post he was pressured by conservative allies to not drop the matter. The government has already started printing census forms without the citizenship question.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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