(CNN) A federal judge has directed the Commerce Department to review and make public a large cache of previously unreleased documents related to the 2020 census and the Trump administration's effort to include a citizenship question in the survey.

The documents, including emails and attachments sent to and from Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and others, amount to around 20,000 pages, the Justice Department told the New York trial court in December. That equates to about 40% of the pages the government had previously produced in the litigation.

The Justice Department had argued the documents should not be released in their entirety because the case has already been decided. After a Supreme Court ruling in the case last year, President Donald Trump and Ross announced they would no longer seek to add the controversial question about citizenship status, which critics believe would depress the response rate to the survey.

Judge Jesse Furman, who heard the original trial in his New York courtroom in 2018, wrote Thursday that his directive was "more aggressive" than the government wanted and that he realizes it "will impose burdens on the Department of Justice."

"But Defendants have no one but themselves to blame since the documents at issue should have been produced a year and a half ago," he wrote.

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