In a court filing released on Wednesday, Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt indicated that the Department of Justice will explore new ways to ask whether responders to the 2020 census are citizens of the US.
The Supreme Court ruled on the citizenship question last week. It left in place a lower court’s decision to block the question, explaining that while the government is not inherently barred from including a citizenship question, the government failed to give a reasonable explanation for the inclusion of the question.
In the filing released today, Assistant Attorney General Hunt said that “We at the Department of Justice have been instructed to examine whether there is a path forward, consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision, that would allow us to include the citizenship question on the census.”
