House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said President Donald Trump wants to add a citizenship question to next year's Census because he wants to 'make America white again' during a news conference in San Francisco on Monday.

The California Democrat says the administration is battling in federal court to insert the question because it would have a chilling effect on who responds.

Census Bureau experts and critics of the question say it would discourage people who are living in the U.S. illegally, including large numbers of migrants from Central America, from responding.

The Supreme Court has temporarily blocked the question's inclusion, and Department of Justice lawyers involved in the court cases challenging the question across the country filed motions to withdraw on Monday.

One former DOJ attorney said the withdrawals were likely because the lawyers were likely having a hard time arguing for the citizenship question 'within the bounds of ethics and within the bounds of the law.'

'The Supreme Court did not rule in their favor because they said the administration did not give sufficient evidence as to why the citizenship question should be there,' Pelosi said.

Pelosi said on Monday that if people don't fill out their census forms, the administration will win.

The Census is used to distribute congressional seats and government funds.

Undercounting migrants would shift federal representation and dollars away from areas where they live.

'This is about "make America white again,"' Pelosi said. 'They [the Trump administration] want to make sure that certain people are counted. It's really disgraceful and it's not what our founders had in mind.

'And what they want to do is to put a chilling effect, so certain populations will not answer the form. They won't respond. And we're saying don't get them that victory.'

She added: 'You must respond. Because otherwise they win.'

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said President Donald Trump wants to add a citizenship question to next year's Census because he wants to 'make America white again' during a news conference in San Francisco on Monday

The Trump administration had said the question was being added to aid in enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voters' access to the ballot box. But in the Supreme Court's decision last week, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court's four more liberal members in saying the administration's current justification for the question 'seems to have been contrived.'

Following the ruling, a department spokesperson confirmed on July 2 that there would be 'no citizenship question on the 2020 census.'

In what appeared to be a sign that the Trump 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.'

But the next day, Trump appeared to overrule that statement, sowing enough confusion that Hazel and U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman, overseeing a census lawsuit in New York, demanded clarification.

'The News Reports about the Department of Commerce dropping its quest to put the Citizenship Question on the Census is incorrect or, to state it differently, FAKE! We are absolutely moving forward, as we must, because of the importance of the answer to this question,' Trump tweeted on July 3.

In what appeared to be a sign that the Trump administration was ending the legal fight, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement on Tuesday that the 'Census Bureau has started the process of printing the decennial questionnaires without the question.' But the next day, Trump appeared to controvert that statement, tweeting 'we are absolutely moving forward'

Following confusion of whether the administration would or would not pursue a route that would sidestep SCOTUS's ruling, many members of the DOJ legal teams assigned to federal court cases related to the citizen question filed court documents seeking to withdraw on Monday.

A Justice Department official said on Monday that a top civil attorney in the department, John Burnham, will no longer lead the litigation team.

NPR's national correspondent covering the 2020 census reported the changes late on Monday in a Twitter thread showing DOJ lawyers withdrawing from the census question cases in California, New York and Maryland.

'To reassign the trial team at this stage in litigation is — to not put too fine a point on it — insane,' former DOJ Civil Rights Division career attorney Sam Oliker-Friedland said.

'I suspect that it is a move of a Department of Justice that is serving a client that is asking them to do something that they are finding very difficult to do within the bounds of ethics and within the bounds of the law.'

Oliker-Friedland joined the DOJ's Civil Rights division under former president Barack Obama and left after Trump took office.

'To take yourself off of a case in the middle of litigation, and certainly for an entire office to take off in the middle of litigation, would not just be because of personal disagreement with a particular policy choice,' a former DOJ attorney who asked not to be identified for fear speaking out may jeopardize the attorney's current job said.

'It has to be something more extreme than that, more to the core of what your ethical and professional obligations are as an attorney.'