Trump 'determined' to add citizenship question to census, top immigration official says

The acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Ken Cuccinelli, expressed confidence Sunday that the administration would succeed in appending a citizenship question to the 2020 census, insisting President Donald Trump is determined to have the query added to the document.

“I think the president has expressed determination,” Cuccinelli told “Fox News Sunday.”

“He has noted that the Supreme Court didn't say, ‘This can't be asked.’ They said that they didn't appreciate the process by which it came forward the first time,” Cuccinelli said. “So the president is determined to fix that and to have it roll forward in the 2020 census.”

The Supreme Court ruled last month that the administration’s justification for tacking a citizenship question onto the census was inadequate, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced Tuesday that the administration would be scrapping its plans to include the question on the decennial survey’s printed version. The Constitution requires the nation’s population be counted every 10 years.

But Trump tweeted Wednesday that officials “are absolutely moving forward” and told reporters outside the White House on Friday that despite the Supreme Court ruling, he is considering implementing an executive order to add the question. Justice Department lawyers have confirmed in recent days that DOJ and the Commerce Department are still considering a legal path forward.

Cuccinelli, Virginia’s former attorney general, claimed Sunday he had no constitutional qualms with the addition of the question.

“I don’t have a problem with that at all,” he said. “I think that if you look at what we’ve asked over the years, including, of course, the citizenship question famously asked many, many times through our history, we ask a lot of other information as well."

Besides counting the population, Cuccinelli said, “We find out a lot of other information that’s useful for governance.”

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine