Trump To Seek Citizenship Data Via Federal Agencies

The Huffington Post reports:

President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he is dropping his administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, an abrupt reversal that came after Trump repeatedly insisted he would push ahead with trying to add the question.

Rather than add the question to the 2020 census, which will go to every household in America, Trump instructed other executive agencies to immediately provide all of their citizenship records to the Department of Commerce, which oversees the census.

Census Bureau officials authored a memo last year arguing they could better collect citizenship data using existing government administrative records.

Trump says he’ll order Commerce to use existing records to determine citizenship status of US residents – the method a top Census Bureau official recommended in January 2018 (and which Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross ignored) pic.twitter.com/VOiS3fjJaA

— Ted Hesson (@tedhesson) July 11, 2019