Hansi Lo Wang

Updated 8:50 p.m. ET

Updated 10:33 p.m. ET

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has temporarily blocked lower court orders for depositions by two senior Trump administration officials in the multiple lawsuits over the new question about U.S. citizenship status on the 2020 census.

Updated 7:04 p.m. ET

President Trump's nominee for the Census Bureau's next director, Steven Dillingham, took one step closer to filling a key leadership post for the 2020 census that's been empty for more than a year.

Updated Oct. 5, 7:05 p.m. ET

This week, the Trump administration moved the legal fight over its controversial plan to add a question about citizenship status to the 2020 census to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Updated 11:48 p.m. ET

Justice Department official John Gore must sit for questioning by attorneys for the lawsuits over the citizenship question his department requested to be added to the 2020 census, a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled.

Updated, September 21, 7:48 p.m. ET

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to make its main official behind the 2020 census citizenship question — Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross — available to testify out of court for the lawsuits over the hotly contested question.

Updated 11:57 p.m. ET

Plans to add questions about sexual orientation and gender identity to the largest survey in the U.S. — the Census Bureau's American Community Survey — stalled after President Trump entered the White House last year.

Updated Sept. 18

The Justice Department, which the Trump administration says needs the controversial citizenship question added to the 2020 census, initially did not want to make the request, according to newly unredacted portions of a memo.

The first potential trial of the six lawsuits over the hotly contested 2020 census citizenship question could kick off the day before voters head to the polls for the upcoming midterm elections.

During a court hearing at Manhattan federal court on Friday, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman set the tentative start date for Nov. 5, adding that his "strong instinct" is that the two cases before him require a courtroom trial before he can issue a ruling.

Updated September 14

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and his staff prepared to embark on a legal fight that would take them to the highest court in the U.S. long before announcing the controversial decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

A federal judge in Maryland is allowing a lawsuit over the hotly contested citizenship question on the 2020 census to proceed, bringing the total number of lawsuits judges have greenlighted despite the Trump administration's efforts to get them tossed out of court to five.

The Trump administration has lost another round in its efforts to get courts to dismiss lawsuits challenging the citizenship question it added to the 2020 census.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg issued an order allowing two cases filed at San Francisco federal court to continue.

The legal fight over the controversial citizenship question on the 2020 census is likely to continue at San Francisco federal court.

"I believe the case will proceed," U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg said Friday during a hearing on whether to dismiss two of the lawsuits against the Census Bureau and the Commerce Department, which oversees the census.

Updated 7:55 p.m. ET, August 3

Officials at the U.S. Government Publishing Office botched the awarding of its single largest contract — the 2020 census printing contract — according to a memo from the federal agency's Office of the Inspector General.

"Our investigation revealed GPO did not do an adequate job of protecting the interests of the Government," concluded former Inspector General Michael Raponi, who authored the report obtained by NPR.

A group of Democratic senators have introduced a bill on Tuesday that would require the U.S. census and the country's largest survey to start directly asking about sexual orientation and gender identity.

If the Census Equality Act becomes law, sexual orientation and gender identity questions would have to be added to forms for the census by 2030 and for the American Community Survey — a survey that about 1 in 38 households are required by federal law to complete every year — by 2020.