President Trump on Thursday backed off his threat to order that a citizenship question be added to the 2020 Census, and instead instructed the government to count the number of citizens and noncitizens living in the United States another way.

Trump said he would issue a different executive order to accomplish his goal.

“I’m hereby ordering every department and agency in the federal government to provide the Department of Commerce with all requested records regarding the number of citizens and non-citizens in our country,” he said from the White House Rose Garden.

“They must furnish all records in their possession immediately. We will utilize these vast federal databases to gain a full, complete, and accurate count of the non-citizen population, including databases maintained by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration.”

The database usage will likely draw cries of Big Brother from civil libertarians.

The president began his remarks by mocking opponents — and the courts — for blocking the question.

“Are you a citizen of the United States of America? Oh, gee, I’m sorry, I just can’t answer that question,” he said before asserting that his opponents were trying to destroy the very concept of citizenship.

“There used to be a time when you could answer questions like that very easily. There used to be a time when you could proudly declare, I am a citizen of the United States. Now they’re trying to erase the very existence of a very important word and a very important thing, citizenship,” Trump said.

“This is part of a broader left-wing effort to erode the rights of the American citizen and is very unfair to our country.”

Pursuing the original order, he said, would only result in more litigation before courts that he called “extremely unfriendly to us.”

Critics of the Trump administration’s effort said that asking about citizenship in the census discriminated against racial minorities, would discourage participation in obtaining an accurate population count and was aimed at giving Republicans an unfair advantage in elections.

Trump and his supporters say it makes sense to know how many non-citizens are living in the country.

The census is used to determine how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives and also affects how billions of dollars in federal funds are allocated.

Courts had halted Trump’s attempts to add the census question after challenges from some states and civil rights groups.

The Supreme Court, with Chief Justice John Roberts casting the key swing vote, blocked the citizenship question on June 27, faulting the administration’s rationale for including it as “contrived.”

Opponents of the proposed census citizenship question had vowed to challenge Trump’s new action in court.

The legal battle has also extended to how the Department of Justice has handled the case. Attorney General William Barr sought to shake up his legal team by replacing the lawyers handling litigation on the census, but two federal judges blocked the move, at least temporarily.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had said last week that the question would not be included.

But Trump then tweeted that he wanted to pursue the issue, and Barr said the Justice Department would try to figure out a justification