A coalition of elected officials, community activists, and labor and civic leaders in New York City is already stirring ahead of the next census in 2030 amid a brewing battle over whether to include noncitizens in the population count.
These allies came together for the last census, in 2020, running phone banks and flooding social media, to reach more New Yorkers at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Now they are beginning to mobilize again — this time over what they see as threats from the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress to exclude noncitizens, which could lead to a significant undercount of the city’s population.
“I have to say it feels like I’m at a census reunion,” said Councilwoman Julie Menin, a Democrat from Manhattan’s East Side, as she welcomed about 150 people at an April gathering at New York Law School in Lower Manhattan.
Though the population of New York State reached 20.2 million in 2020 — buoyed by the growth of its largest city to a record 8.8 million — it has steadily lost ground for decades to faster-growing states, like Florida and Texas, in the southern and western parts of the United States.
One result of that is the state’s shrinking congressional delegation, which has dropped to 26 representatives from 45 in the 1940s.
Now there is growing alarm over the Trump administration’s immigration raids and over a renewed push by Republican lawmakers to require the census to ask respondents whether they are U.S. citizens and to exclude noncitizens from counts used to apportion congressional seats.
More than 4.5 million migrants live in New York State, about 23.1 percent of its total population, according to a breakdown of 2023 census data from the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. Of those 4.5 million, about 1.8 million are noncitizens.
Jeffrey M. Wice, a census expert and adjunct professor at New York Law School, said that the state already stood to lose two more congressional seats based on current population estimates and could lose even more if noncitizens were excluded from the counts.
“It could be very bad,” Mr. Wice said. “If you want that hospital, if you want better schools, if you want better streets, it all gets down to representation and funding.”
The looming battle over the next census comes amid other concerns, including the Trump administration’s cost cutting and hiring freeze of federal workers. The U.S. Census Bureau has had funding and staffing problems that many population experts worry may undermine its ability to carry out an accurate count.
In a statement, the bureau said it was “committed to delivering innovative solutions to ensure an accurate count of the nation” and that “through collaboration with state and local leaders, the American people will have a renewed faith in their nation’s federal statistics.”
At the recent census gathering, Ms. Menin, who previously served as director of the census for New York City, highlighted the city’s strategies in counting people for the 2020 census, underscoring the urgency of building on those successes for the coming count.
The last census campaign included ads in 27 languages and public service announcements from the entertainers Cardi B, Alicia Keys and Lin-Manuel Miranda. The city also funded $19 million in grants to 157 community groups for census outreach.
The decennial census is not merely a snapshot of the nation’s population. The state counts are used to divide up the House of Representatives and the Electoral College and to redraw political boundaries at all levels of government. The census figures guide the allocation of billions of dollars in federal funds and resources for vital programs and services, including local hospitals, schools and public transportation facilities.
Most recently, New York lost one House seat after the 2020 census, coming up short by just 89 people under a complicated formula set by Congress. “New York lost by a crowded subway car,” Mr. Wice said.
The 2020 census was contentious even before the pandemic. The first Trump administration attempted to add a question asking respondents whether they were U.S. citizens. The Commerce Department, which oversees the census, argued that a more accurate count of citizens was needed to enforce federal voting rights laws.
But critics said a citizenship question would have a chilling effect in immigrant communities and suppress population counts in predominantly Democratic areas like New York City, skewing results toward Republican areas. After New York and other states sued, the Supreme Court blocked the question on procedural grounds — but left an opening for it to be added in the future, legal experts said.
Officials in the current Trump administration have not resurrected the citizenship question. But Republican lawmakers are again considering a House bill, passed last year but blocked by Democrats in the Senate, that would require the census to ask about citizenship and immigration status, and would exclude noncitizens from counts.
Representative Nick LaLota, a Long Island Republican, said the House bill was “about restoring fairness — only American citizens should determine American representation.”
Ciro Riccardi, a spokesman for Representative Mike Lawler, a New York Republican whose district includes the suburbs north of the city, said that counting only citizens in the census should not be controversial. “Democrats and the far-left groups who fund them need to stop trying to incentivize and normalize illegal immigration with bad public policy that is deeply unpopular with American taxpayers,” he said.
Even without a citizenship question, there are growing concerns especially among migrants that sharing any personal information with government agencies could be “weaponized to be used as enforcement instead of being used for public good and public benefits,” said Meeta Anand, senior director of the census and data equity program at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Many experts have also pointed out that census advisory committees, which included demographers, scientists and community advocates, were disbanded in March. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has suggested that taxpayer money could be saved by having the Postal Service conduct the census rather than temporary census workers.
Terri Ann Lowenthal, a consultant who has advised local governments, philanthropies and advocacy groups on the census, said that the challenges and issues facing the 2030 count had put “an accurate census at great risk.”
Already, Ms. Lowenthal pointed out, the Census Bureau has delayed issuing an initial operational plan for the 2030 census, which was to be released by early 2025.
“This is not the time to dismiss concerns about the census,” she said. “The clock is ticking now.”
Overall, 62 percent of New York City households filled out the census surveys on their own in 2020, according to an analysis by Steven Romalewski, the mapping service director at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
But that response rate dropped to under 50 percent in some city neighborhoods, including part of Midtown Manhattan, Borough Park, Brooklyn, and North Corona, Queens. Nationally, the self-response rate was 67 percent. Census workers follow up with residents who do not return surveys, trying to reach every household. But the responses of such residents tend to be less accurate and reliable, leading potentially to undercounting and misinformation, according to census experts.
Mr. Romalewski said that self-response rates around the nation, including in New York City, tended to be lower in communities that were predominantly Black and Hispanic, had lower education levels, higher poverty rates and larger concentrations of immigrants.
New York City planning officials said they had started work to prepare for the 2030 census, including examining various data sources to identify housing addresses that are missing from the Census Bureau’s records to ensure those residents are counted.
Councilwoman Menin has proposed legislation to create a city census office that would increase participation, focusing on historically undercounted groups and neighborhoods with low self-response rates. Similarly, state legislators have proposed creating a statewide census office.
“We know that the unexpected can happen and we need to be building the momentum and the strategies now,” Ms. Menin told her fellow census warriors in April. “We can’t afford to build the plane as we’re flying it.”
Winnie Hu is a Times reporter covering the people and neighborhoods of New York City.
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