President Trump, speaking at the White House on Thursday, announced that he would “immediately” issue an executive order to get an accurate count of non-citizens and citizens in the United States — a measure Trump said would be “far more accurate” than relying on a citizenship question in the 2020 census.
The move would make use of “vast” federal databases and free up information sharing among all federal agencies concerning who they know is living in the country, Trump said.
“Today I’m here to say we are not backing down in our effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population,” the president told reporters in the Rose Garden, after slamming “far-left Democrats” seeking to “conceal the number of illegal aliens in our midst.”
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“We will leave no stone unturned,” Trump asserted. He called legal opposition to adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census “meritless,” but said the ongoing judicial morass in several federal district courts made it logistically impossible to resolve the matter before the 2020 census forms needed to be printed.
Speaking after Trump, Attorney General Bill Barr said the information collected via the executive order could be useful in determining the makeup of the Electoral College and congressional apportionment. – READ MORE