Commerce Secretary Grew Impatient Over Census Citizenship Question, Emails Reveal
Newly-released emails show Secretary Wilbur Ross was "mystified" by delays in adding the question to the 2020 census shortly after joining the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau.
A few months after he started leading the Commerce Department, Secretary Wilbur Ross became impatient. As a powerful decider for the U.S. census, he had a keen interest in adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census as soon as possible.
"I am mystified why nothing [has] been done in response to my months old request that we include the citizenship question. Why not?" he wrote in a May 2017 email to two Commerce Department officials.
The email was among the more than 2,400 pages of internal documents the Trump administration filed in federal courts Monday as part of the lawsuits against Ross' addition of to the 2020 census. NPR has filed Freedom of Information Act requests for similar documents.
