WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department said Friday it will press its search for legal grounds to force the inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2020 Census, hours after President Donald Trump said he is "very seriously" considering an executive order to get the question on the form.

Trump said his administration is exploring a number of legal options, but the Justice Department did not say exactly what options remain since the Supreme Court has barred the question at least temporarily.

The government has already begun the process of printing the census questionnaire without that question.

The administration's focus on asking broadly about citizenship for the first time since 1950 reflects the enormous political stakes and potential costs in the once-a-decade population count determining the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives for the next 10 years and the distribution of some $675 billion in federal spending. It also reflects Trump's interest in reshaping how congressional districts are drawn.

"You need it for Congress, for districting," he said Friday. "How many people are there? Are they citizens? Are they not citizens? You need it for many reasons."

Districts now are based on the total population. Some Republicans want them based on the population of eligible voters, a change potentially disadvantaging Democrats by excluding immigrants. The Supreme Court has left open the issue of whether districts based only on the population of eligible voters is constitutional.

The Census Bureau's own experts have said a citizenship question would discourage immigrants from participating in the survey and result in a less accurate census redistributing money and political power away from Democratic-led cities where immigrants tend to cluster to whiter, rural areas where Republicans do well.

Trump, speaking as he departed the White House for a weekend in New Jersey, said he might take executive action.

An executive order would not, by itself, override court rulings blocking the inclusion of the citizenship question. But such an action from Trump would perhaps give administration lawyers a new basis to try to convince a federal court the question could be included.

Later Friday, Justice Department lawyers formally told U.S. District Judge George Hazel in Maryland the administration is not giving up the legal fight to add the citizenship question to the next census. But they also said it's unclear how they will proceed, according to a court filing.

In the Supreme Court's decision last week, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court's four more liberal members in saying the administration's current justification for the question "seems to have been contrived."

The administration had pushed the Supreme Court to decide the case quickly, citing a July 1 deadline to begin printing the forms. The court made the rare move of taking up the case directly from a trial court in New York before an appeals court had weighed in.

The Trump administration had said the question was being added to aid in enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voters' access to the ballot box.

But the question's opponents say recently discovered evidence from the computer files of a Republican redistricting consultant who died last year shows, far from helping minority voters, discrimination against Hispanics was behind the push for the citizenship question.

Hazel is considering reopening the Maryland case to take account of the new evidence, which could provide a separate basis for blocking the citizenship question.

Preparations for the $15.6 billion 2020 Census are intricately choreographed. More than 425,000 people have already started applying for the half million positions needed for the 2020 Census. The bureau also is in the middle of a test run, with 480,000 households sent questionnaire information, according to the bureau's monthly status report from May.

The ongoing legal wrangling itself could hurt the census, said John Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice. The group is a plaintiff in the Maryland case. "The government is trying to sow seeds of confusion in the public," Yang said.