President Trump insisted Friday that he hasn't turned tail on his crusade to get a U.S. citizenship question in the U.S. Census next year

He appeared to run away from the idea on Thursday, saying he would instead order all his Cabinet agencies to gather the information in other ways.

But Friday he told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House: 'Not only didn't I back down, I backed up. Because anybody else would have given this up a long time ago.'

He also insisted the Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross didn't let him down by failing to make his census effort pass muster in the Supreme Court.

'I think we'll have it in the end where it'll be actually more accurate than a census,' he said. 'Because we have information gotten through other means, whether you look at Social Security or other places, we have, including loan applications.'

'We have information that's probably more accurate than the information we could get by going in and asking somebody, "Are you a citizen?" A lot of people aren't going to tell the truth.'

President Donald Trump said on the the South Lawn of the White House that he didn't actually back down on a census citizenship question, even though it appeared that way a day earlier

A crush of reporters yelled questions at Trump at outgoing Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who announced his resignation

Pens were available at an event for community activists and local government leaders to mark the one-year-out launch of the 2020 Census efforts on April 1

His decision is in line with a high court ruling that blocked the citizenship concept from census questionnaires, at least for a long enough time that it would be approved too late.

'The problem is we had three very unfriendly courts. They were judges that weren't exactly in love with this whole thing, and they were wrong. But it would have taken a long time to get through those courts. ... it would have taken a long time [to get] back up to the Supreme Court,' he said Friday.

A day earlier in the Rose Garden, Trump claimed that 'we are not backing down on our effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population.'

The text of the order was not made public immediately, but Trump said it would 'outline new steps, to ensure citizenship is counted, so that we know how many citizens we have in the United States' for the purposes of apportioning aid and redrawing congressional districts.

'It is essential that we have a clear breakdown of the number of citizens and non-citizens, Trump said, adding that it's 'imperative' and 'vital to formulating sound public policy.'

'We must have a reliable count of how many citizens, non citizens and illegal aliens are in our country,' he insisted. 'We will leave no stone unturned.'

President Trump gave up on his demand for the 2020 Census to ask if people are citizens, falling in line with a Supreme Court ruling blocking the question.

Trump claimed that 'the Supreme Court ultimately affirmed our right' to ask the question but it would have required 'more litigation and considerable time delays' to get court approval.

Those delays would have caused a hold up in the census. 'It is deeply regrettable, but it will not stop us,' he said.

Attorney General William Barr said 'there is simply no way to litigate these issues' and beat various injunctions in time for the census.

'As the Supreme Court recognized, it would be perfectly lawful for the federal government to ask on the census whether individuals are citizens of the United States. It is entirely reasonable to want to know how many citizens and non-citizens there are in the United States,' he said.

Instead, he said the court held that the Commerce Department 'did not adequately explain its decision' to revive the question in the next census.

'We simply cannot complete the litigation in time to complete the census and obtain relief from the current injunctions in time to implement any new decision without jeopardizing our ability to carry out the census itself, which we are not going to do,' he said.

He added, 'So, as a practical matter, the Supreme Court’s decision closed all paths to adding the question to the 2020 decennial census. Put simply, the impediment was logistical, not legal. We simply cannot complete the litigation in time to carry out the census, including appeals.'

Barr denied that the administration was ever thinking about using executive fiat to put the question in the census, in spite of the high court's ruling.

'This has never been under consideration,' he argued, disputing weeks of 'hysterical' reporting on the topic. 'This has been based on rank speculation and nothing more. As should be obvious, that was never under consideration. We have always accepted that a new decision to add a citizenship question to the census would be subject to judicial review.'

At a social media summit beforehand, Trump lamented that the courts were preventing him from asking a question that had been on previous censuses.

'Can you believe, are you a citizen of the United States of America. Sir you cant ask that question. Why? Because a court said you can't,' he mimicked.

Coming back to the topic later, he told his guests they were welcome to join him at the event. 'You can actually come if you want. You can come to the great Rose Garden. You can stand in the rain with me, if you want,' he said.

Teasing the remarks he said he'd come up with a 'solution that will be very good for a lot of people. Really good.'

President Trump will give up on his demand for the 2020 Census to ask if people are citizens in a move he is announcing Thursday

Sources were saying as late as Thursday morning that Trump was eyeing executive action to force the question into the U.S. Census.

But hours before the event, news outlets began reporting that Trump would announce that he would go about it another way - a total abandonment after days of escalating rhetoric that he would keep fighting.

The White House was refusing official comment on the order that Trump revealed in 5 p.m. remarks as speculation inside the building continued.

Trump had said before that he could issue an executive order to include the question - and has insisted that the court never said he could not include the question.

The once-a-decade questionnaire is used to apportion congressional districts and federal aid, meaning it is crucial to the future control of the House of Representatives.

Democrats say that asking about citizenship discourages non-citizens from asking, pushing down the numbers of people in areas which lean their way and giving Republicans an advantage in Congressional maps.

A light rain in Washington later forced the White House to concede that the event might take place indoors in the East Room, instead. The forecast for the 5 pm event was a 70 percent chance of rain

The president said in a morning tweet that he'd hold a news conference on the topic on Thursday afternoon in the Rose Garden.

'The White House will be hosting a very big and very important Social Media Summit today,' he said. 'At its conclusion, we will all go to the beautiful Rose Garden for a News Conference on the Census and Citizenship.'

A light rain in Washington later forced the White House to concede that the event might take place indoors in the East Room, instead. The forecast for the 5 pm event was a 70 percent chance of rain.

But Trump refused, gathering conservative social media influencers and regular White House press in the Rose Garden for event.

White House officials could not say all day what exactly was in the order that Trump is expected to sign as he welcomes more than a hundred conservatives to the building for the social media summit.

Larry Kudlow, the president's top economic adviser, declined to comment when DailyMail.com caught him on the driveway after a TV appearance. He said he doesn't 'know much' about the executive action.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said after the president's remarks that the new attempt to count the number of U.S. citizens was 'ham-handed' and just as 'misguided' as his original effort.

'President Trump is so intent on intimidating communities of color that even when the courts and rule of law thwart him, he still tries to persist in his ham-handed ways. The president’s retreat on adding the misguided citizen question to the census was long overdue and is a significant victory for democracy and fair representation. Every person must be counted and no one should be intimidated by the president and his capricious behavior,' he said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been skeptical at a Thursday press conference that Trump could get around a Supreme Court ruling barring the question's inclusion, even as the White House suggested he'd try.

She said the House would vote next week on a resolution of criminal contempt Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who attended the Thursday event but did not speak, so it can enforce a subpoena to testify and get the facts.

'Well, I don't know. There's an injunction that he just has to overcome. It's an injunction against putting citizenship on the ballot. We have been printing the census forms. June 30th was the deadline. So we're printing the forms,' she said.

Pelosi told Capitol Hill reporters, 'We fully expect the census to go forward. The president's effort to put the citizenship question on the census will continue to be challenged in court.

'The Supreme Court destroyed the administration's argument that the question was needed to support the Voting Rights Act - including their rationale was based on a contrived pretext,' she said. 'Next week the House will vote on a resolution of criminal contempt on attorney general Barr and Wilbur Ross so we can enforce the subpoenas and get the facts.'

Schumer had directed a tirade on the subject at Trump on the chamber's floor in response to reports that the president planned to ignore the high court.

'That is outrageous. It’s outrageous substantively. And it’s outrageous because this president has so little respect for rule of law, he thinks he can just issue executive orders and go around the Congress, go around established law, and try to bully the courts. I believe he will be thwarted by the courts,' he said.

Schumer said that Trump is destroying the rule of law and the values that make this country great. He warned that Trump's actions are reminiscent of power grabs by dictators in the early stages who were originally elected to office and later took over their governments.

'It is nothing more—the president’s action—than a naked political power grab, which is one of the few things he’s good at as president. And it shows once again just how little respect the president has for our democracy,' he argued. 'This is what dictators do in banana republics: they try to change the rules to consolidate political power no matter what their Constitutions, rule of law, say.'

Conservatives are backing Trump in his bid to ask every household in America whether its residents are citizens of the country, if he can find a way to move forward.

The House Freedom Caucus, a group of the most conservative legislators in Congress, said it backed his bid to find a legal pathway for the proposition.

'This is a critical issue and a common sense proposal, supported by a wide majority of Americans. We should want to know how many American citizens live in America,' the group said.

Critics of the question worried it would suppress responses from people who are living in the U.S. illegally, including large numbers of migrants from Central America, from responding to the survey that is used to determine the size of the entire population.

The Supreme Court blocked the question's inclusion in the 2020 survey after it ruled that the Trump administration had not provided an adequate explanation for the question's inclusion.

Department of Justice lawyers subsequently filed motions to withdraw their arguments in cases around the country.

Ross said then, 'Census Bureau has started the process of printing the decennial questionnaires without the question.'

But Trump said in a tweet that the action was wrong. '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!' he said.

'We are absolutely moving forward, as we must,' he asserted.

DOJ then reversed course. 'We at the Department of Justice have been instructed to examine whether there is a path forward consistent with the Supreme Court's decision that would allow us to include the citizenship question on the census,' DOJ lawyer Jody Hunt argued in court.

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

Fake news? Trump had claimed he would press ahead with his crusade to ask the citizenship question but in fact, he surrendered

The president vented Tuesday on Twitter about the Supreme Court's decision on the 2020 census, along with other rulings the nine robed justices have handed down.

In the end, the president backed down, and broke down data-sharing walls between federal agencies, instead, so that they can share data with one another on aid applicants' statuses.

'It will be, we think, far more accurate,' Trump said of his new accounting method.

Pelosi said Monday that everyone must fill out the census form. Federal representation and dollars will be shifted away from the communities where they live, if they don't answer the question.

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

The California Democrat said, '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.'

'You must respond. Because otherwise they win,' she said at a press conference.