Trump says he is 'thinking of' executive order to revive census citizenship question

WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump said Friday that he is "thinking of" issuing an executive order to add a controversial citizenship question to the 2020 Census, telling reporters at the White House that he is exploring four or five different options.

His comments came as government lawyers scramble to find a legal path to carry out Trump's wishes despite their conclusions in recent days that no such avenue exists.

Census officials and lawyers at the Justice and Commerce departments scrapped holiday plans and spent their Independence Day seeking new legal rationales for a citizenship question that critics say could lead to a steep undercount of immigrants, which could limit federal funding to some communities and skew congressional redistricting to favor Republicans.

A federal judge in Maryland overseeing one of three lawsuits on the citizenship question has given the Trump administration until 2 p.m. Friday to explain how it intends to proceed. The government has begun printing the census forms without the question, and that process will continue, administration officials said.

The question had seemed settled after the Supreme Court ruled last week against the Trump administration. As late as Tuesday evening, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the census, said the administration was dropping its effort and was printing the census forms without the citizenship question.

But Trump, in tweets Wednesday and Thursday, said he was not giving up. He tweeted Thursday morning: "So important for our Country that the very simple and basic 'Are you a Citizen of the United States?' question be allowed to be asked in the 2020 Census. Department of Commerce and the Department of Justice are working very hard on this, even on the 4th of July!"

The reversal came after Trump talked by phone with conservative allies who urged him not to give up the fight, according to a senior White House official and a Trump adviser, who both spoke on the condition of anonymity.