President Donald Trump was foiled during his first administration when he attempted to change the U.S. census, the decennial head count that determines each state’s representation in Congress. This week, he reignited and escalated that battle, setting up a fresh fight that he should — and probably will — lose again.
The Census Bureau proposed on Wednesday that its next count, in 2030, exclude any non-U.S. citizen without a green card. The administration argued that these individuals are “not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a ‘usual residence’ in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States.”
Trump, in a Truth Social post last August, put his intentions more bluntly: “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS.”
No matter your view on immigration, the move would clearly violate the the 14th Amendment, which mandates that representation in Congress be apportioned according to “the whole number of persons in each state.” The text makes no mention of the citizenship or legal status of those individuals nor their “allegiance.”
The Constitution codified a simple democratic principle: Members of Congress represent every person of their state or district, regardless of whether those residents voted for them or even could. That reflects the reality that even people who are living in the United States illegally are subject to its laws, pay taxes and retain unalienable rights. Elected officials can choose to not care about some of their constituents as much as others, but they cannot pretend that they do not count at all.
The administration’s proposal is bound to face legal challenges. Ahead of the 2020 Census, Trump wanted to add a question about respondents’ citizenship status. The clear intent seemed to be to dissuade illegal immigrants from answering the government survey. In 2019, the Supreme Court allowed a lower court to block the change on the basis that Trump’s own remarks about his intentions — to affect congressional redistricting — undercut the Justice Department’s contrived rationale.
Trump and his team will presumably be more careful about how they present their proposal this time, even if the intent remains the same. Excluding anyone who is not a citizen or lacks a green card would harm states with greater numbers of immigrants — states that tend to be more Democratic. It could reduce not just the states’ number of representatives but also their federal funding.
The proposal posted to the Federal Register also calls for blocking the census from asking about race or ethnicity, even though such data has been collected in every census since 1790.
The Trump administration has already abused the powers of the Census Bureau by issuing a report in August claiming that 24,000 noncitizens voted in the 2020 presidential election. The report did not adequately explain its methodology or provide sufficient data to allow independent verification of its claims. John Abowd, who was the bureau’s chief scientist from 2016 to 2022, said the report was “at best irresponsible but more likely pure partisan manipulation.”
Trump has similarly revealed his willingness to hijack the machinery of elections by pressuring Republican-controlled state legislatures to gerrymander their congressional maps, prompting Democrats to do the same in what has become a race to the bottom. The courts would do the country a favor by stopping the administration from throwing the census into that partisan maelstrom.
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