The US Justice Department had insisted to the Supreme Court that it needed the matter resolved by the end of June because of a deadline to begin printing census forms and other materials. Loading But on Wednesday, department officials told a federal judge in Maryland they believed there could be a way to meet Trump's demands. "There may be a legally available path," Assistant Attorney-General Joseph Hunt told US District Judge George Hazel during a conference call with parties to one of three census lawsuits. Trump felt so strongly about the issue that he was considering using an executive order to include the question, Axios and The Washington Post reported.

A department spokeswoman had confirmed on Tuesday that there would be "no citizenship question on the 2020 census" amid signs that the administration was ending the legal fight. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement that day that the "Census Bureau has started the process of printing the decennial questionnaires without the question". It was a Trump tweet on Wednesday - "We are absolutely moving forward" - that sowed enough confusion that Hazel and US District Judge Jesse Furman, overseeing a census lawsuit in New York, demanded clarification. "I don't know how many federal judges have Twitter accounts, but I happen to be one of them, and I follow the President, and so I saw a tweet that directly contradicted the position" that a Justice Department lawyer took in a hearing Tuesday, Hazel said. Fear and confusion among immigrants might just be the Republican President's aim, a lawyer for opponents of the question said, because the Census Bureau's own experts have said asking about citizenship would depress participation by immigrants and people who are in the country illegally.

"The President's tweet has some of the same effects that the addition of the question would in the first place and some of the same effects on the 18-month battle that was just waged over the citizenship question," Mexican-American Legal Defence Fund lawyer Denise Hulett said. "It leaves the immigrant communities to believe that the Government is still after information that could endanger them." President Donald Trump is considering using an executive order to include the citizenship question in the census. Credit:AP In the short term, work on the census probably won't be affected. The company with a $US114 million contract to print census questionnaires had been instructed to start printing forms without the citizenship question. Joshua Gardner, a second Justice Department lawyer on the conference call, confirmed that "the Census Bureau is continuing with the process of printing the questionnaire without a citizenship question, and that process has not stopped". Gardner, a 16-year Justice Department lawyer, said he was as surprised by Trump's Wednesday tweet as anyone.

"The tweet this morning was the first I had heard of the President's position on this issue, just like the plaintiffs and Your Honour," he said. "I do not have a deeper understanding of what that means at this juncture other than what the President has tweeted." Hazel moved up to Friday from Monday a deadline for the government to stipulate that it is no longer seeking to put the question on the 2020 census. Otherwise, he said, he would move ahead with reopening the case to pursue a new issue. Opponents of the citizenship question say evidence from the computer files of a Republican redistricting consultant who died last year shows that discrimination against Hispanics was behind the push for the citizenship question. That might be a separate basis for blocking the citizenship question.