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This was only true in the narrowest sense. Evidence in the lawsuits show that interest in the issue went back to the fall of 2016, when a transitional team preparing the Trump presidency added it to a list of points to take into account. This suggestion came from Mr. Hofeller, the mastermind of a series of gerrymanders fired in 2011 that have locked the Republican party in a decade of control of state legislatures nationwide.
Mr. Ross repeatedly said that he had decided to add a citizenship question only after the Department of Justice had asked for it, saying that better citizenship data would help to enforce the law on voting rights. The evidence in the proceedings, however, showed that Mr. Ross had pressured the department to ask the question of citizenship, not the other way around.
The addition of the question seemed to be a top priority for the Secretary of Commerce.
Less than two weeks after taking office in 2017, Ross asked an assistant to research whether recent censuses had asked questions about citizenship (they did not have it) and whether non-citizens were included in the population counts used for the distribution (they were).
In April, at the request of Trump's chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, Ross spoke about the census with Kris Kobach, then secretary of state for Kansas and virulent opponent of immigration. In a subsequent email, Mr. Kobach told Mr. Ross that it was essential to add a citizenship question to solve "the problem of foreigners who do not actually reside in the United States are still taken into account for the distribution by the Congress ".
Mr. Ross later stated that he did not respond to Mr. Kobach's advice.
It was only in December that the Justice Department formally asked for a citizenship question in a three-page request, claiming that the addition of the petition was "essential" to obtain sufficiently specific data on non-citizens to apply the Voting Rights Act.
Over the following months, experts concluded that the issue would deter at least 630,000 households with millions of people from completing the census form and offered Mr. Ross alternatives that they felt would produce a significant difference. the same data. Public comments on the proposal and the response of companies and experts were almost uniformly opposed to the addition of the question.
However, Mr. Ross was not discouraged, and the Commerce Department later stated that his seduction with the Department of Justice was not evidence of complacency, but an example of civic education about how the policy is elaborated.
"Executive officials discussing important issues before formulating a policy testify to good government," spokesman Kevin Manning said in a statement. "The executive officials worked together to ensure that Secretary Ross received all the information necessary to make an informed decision."
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