During a press conference on Thursday, Donald Trump announced that his administration was backing off of its efforts to add a question about citizenship to the upcoming U.S. census, a move that, according to the Census Bureau's own research, would likely have intimidated many households with immigrant family members out of responding to the census at all.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration argued to the Supreme Court that it needed the citizenship question on the census to protect minority voting rights, a claim that five justices found too flimsy to take seriously, especially after leaked e-mails showed that a high-ranking Census Bureau official had regularly been in touch with a GOP gerrymandering expert. The president had been threatening to forcibly add the question via executive order, which would be an unconstitutional defiance of the Supreme Court, fueling concerns about a constitutional crisis. In a statement, Daniel Ho, the director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, wrote, "It is clear [Trump] simply wanted to sow fear in immigrant communities and turbocharge Republican gerrymandering efforts by diluting the political influence of Latino communities."

But even as the administration retreats from its census fight, it's ramping up its campaign against immigrants on other fronts. In lieu of the citizenship question, the president signed an executive order for the Commerce Department to begin collecting the same information instead. Every department and agency in the federal government "must furnish all legally accessible records in their possession immediately. We will utilize these vast federal databases to gain a full, complete, and accurate count of the noncitizen population," Trump said in the Rose Garden. The text of Trump's executive order says explicitly that "it may be open to States to design State and local legislative districts based on the population of voter-eligible citizens." Journalist Ari Berman, who specializes in voting rights, tweeted, "There you have it. The goal of citizenship question all along was to draw districts to shift power to white GOP areas."

The same day as Trump's announcement, The New York Times reported that, according to several current and former Homeland Security officials, the administration plans to begin massive immigration raids targeting families across the country starting on Sunday. Acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli confirmed to reporters that raids were indeed coming. In a revival of a previously stalled plan from Trump's anti-immigrant adviser Stephen Miller, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is expected to arrest and deport as many as 2,000 people in ten cities, and will likely include "collateral" deportations, in which authorities "detain immigrants who happened to be on the scene, even though they were not targets of the raids," according to the Times.

John Sandweg, who served as acting director of ICE under President Barack Obama, told NPR it was unusual and even counterproductive to announce raids in advance, adding, "That violates the cardinal rule, which is that you maintain the element of surprise both to protect the safety of your officers and to ensure the effectiveness of the operation." But publicizing raids is an effective intimidation tactic to promote fear and instability in immigrant communities across the country.

Under President Obama, ICE was instructed to focus its efforts on undocumented immigrants with serious criminal convictions, but the Times reports that many of the people targeted for arrest and deportation in Sunday's raids have merely missed court dates. The ACLU filed a lawsuit on Thursday to preemptively stop the deportations, arguing that many of the people and children ordered to be removed never received notice to appear in court. The complaint reads in part, "In thousands of cases, the government mailed notices to incorrect addresses; sent them with no date or time; and set hearings for dates—including weekends—when no hearings were being held at all."