Thomas Hofeller, a Republican strategist who died last year, left behind computer files showing that he wrote a study in 2015 that said adding a citizenship question would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to cement the party’s power. He also wrote part of a Justice Department letter that said the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.

What’s next: The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of the citizenship question within weeks. The documents were cited in a court filing on Thursday by opponents of the question, which they say would deter many immigrants from being counted.

Response: The Justice Department said the accusations in the filing were baseless and that Mr. Hofeller’s study had “played no role in the department’s December 2017 request to reinstate a citizenship question to the 2020 decennial census.”

Behind the collapse of a nursing home chain

Rosewood Care Centers, a Chicago nursing-home business, defaulted last year on $146 million in government-backed mortgages. It was the biggest collapse in the history of a program run by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The program was created in 1959 to help ensure that Americans had access to affordable nursing homes. It now guarantees $20 billion in mortgages to more than 2,300 nursing homes — about 15 percent of the country’s total — most of which are private, for-profit enterprises.

Why it matters: HUD officials described Rosewood as an outlier, but the agency manages a portfolio of loans that are at risk of going bad. Taxpayers could be on the hook for money-losing facilities around the country, just as waves of aging baby boomers are likely to swell America’s nursing-home population.