President Donald Trump has backed down in the face of the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal court orders, but will direct the Commerce Dept. to determine the number of U.S. Citizens via other methods, according to multiple reports.
Trump will make the announcement Thursday afternoon at a Rose Garden press event that was scheduled for 2:30 PM ET. Trump earlier in the day was set to announce he would take executive action to place the citizenship question on the Census. Experts said if he does it will spark a constitutional crisis.
ABC News and MSNBC are both reporting that Trump will change course.
Dale Ho, the Director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, calls it a “total defeat” for the Trump administration, if the reports Trump is backing down are correct, and notes that Commerce had actually recommended this very course of action in 2017.
Experts predicted that had the citizenship question been added to the Census 9 million people would not have been counted, due to fears of being deported or otherwise targeted for legal action.
The damage is already done, however. The news for weeks has focused on this issue, and the final decision will not reach everyone across the United States.