President Donald Trump surrendered his legal fight earlier this month to ask about citizenship on the upcoming census, but his administration is marching forward on a Republican strategy that could upend the way legislative districts are drawn nationwide to the benefit of the party.

Trump nodded to policy issues such as health care and education as reasons he issued a July 11 executive order for the government to compile citizenship information in a different way. And he accused “far-left Democrats” of being determined to “conceal the number of illegal aliens in our midst.”

But he also referred to how it could be used in the next round of redistricting after the 2020 census — a move critics suggest is the real reason the Trump administration wants to find out where noncitizens reside.

“Some states may want to draw state and local legislative districts based upon the voter-eligible population,” Trump said in the Rose Garden announcement. The same citizenship information, he continued, can be used to make decisions about “representation in Congress.”

That would be a huge change. Almost all states divvied up legislative districts after the 2010 census so that each had equal numbers of people. With more precise citizenship information, Texas and other states could instead slice up their states into districts with equal numbers of voters.