President Donald Trump is calling for a new census that excludes undocumented immigrants from its population count amid his push to redraw electoral maps in Republicans’ favor and weaken the political power of those voters less likely to support him.
Trump on Thursday announced that he has directed the Department of Commerce to “immediately” start working on an updated census that is “highly accurate” and uses the 2024 presidential election “results and information.”
“People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS,” the President wrote on Truth Social.
The census, which the Constitution mandates to count every resident of the United States every 10 years, was last conducted in 2020. It is used to determine the number of seats delegated to each state in the House of Representatives—a process the 14th Amendment requires be based on a count of “the whole number of persons in each State.” The population count also informs how the government allocates federal funding for programs and public services including healthcare, education, and infrastructure.
The process typically involves thousands of temporary workers attempting to visit every household in the country and requires years of preparation.
Trump’s effort to reshape the census comes as Republicans, under mounting pressure from the White House, seek to redraw congressional maps to secure more GOP seats in the House. Texas has become the center of the redistricting battle as state Democrats have fled to Illinois, New York, and other blue states to stall a vote on a Republican plan that would add about five additional seats to their wing.
“We should have many more seats in California. It’s all gerrymandered,” Trump said in a Tuesday interview with CNBC. “I won Texas. I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know, and we are entitled to five more seats.”
The governors of New York and California have said that their states are exploring their own redistricting efforts in response to Texas’s.
Removing undocumented immigrants from the census’s population count would likely impact the number of House seats apportioned to multiple states—including both Texas and California. There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., per the Department of Homeland Security; as of 2022, Texas and California were home to roughly 42 percent of them.
In 2020, a Pew Research Center analysis found that subtracting undocumented immigrants from that year’s census count would lead to Texas, California, and Florida each losing a congressional seat.
The President’s latest order follows a number of other similarly aimed efforts from Republicans—including Trump himself.
During his first term, Trump issued a memo ordering that immigrants without lawful status be excluded from the population count used to apportion House seats and repeatedly sought to add a citizenship question to the census for the first time since 1950.
Those actions faced criticism and legal challenges at the time, and ultimately did not affect the 2020 census. The Supreme Court in 2019 blocked the Trump Administration from including the citizenship question, saying that it hadn’t given sufficient reason for adding it. A year later, the court ruled it was “premature” to bring a legal challenge against the order to remove noncitizens from the count. The unsigned decision from the court did not directly address whether such an exclusion would be legal, though it said that “everyone agrees by now that the Government cannot feasibly implement the memorandum by excluding the estimated 10.5 million aliens without lawful status.”
In an Executive Order issued soon after he took office, President Joe Biden reaffirmed the practice of including all residents in the census count and revoked Trump’s memo.” Trump, in turn, reversed that order after returning to the White House in January.
Several Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate have also introduced bills that would change the census count used to apportion seats to only include U.S. citizens. At least four Republican state attorneys filed a legal challenge this January looking to exclude undocumented people from the count—an effort that was later paused by a judge in March at the request of Trump Administration lawyers, who said they needed time to determine how to approach the case.
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