Demonstrators rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., in 2019 to protest the first Trump administration’s failed push to add a question about a person’s U.S. citizenship status to 2020 census forms.
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
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Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
With preparations for the 2030 census already underway, President Trump said Thursday he has instructed his administration to start work on a “new” census.
In a social media post, Trump also called for an unprecedented exclusion of millions of people living in the U.S. without legal status.
The 14th Amendment requires the “whole number of persons in each state” to be included in a key set of census numbers used to determine how presidents and members of Congress are elected.
It’s unclear if Trump is referring to the regularly scheduled national head count in 2030 or an earlier tally.
Trump said he’s instructed the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, to “immediately begin work” on a census using “the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024.” It’s unclear why the election results would matter to the census.
The press offices for the White House, Commerce Department and Census Bureau did not immediately respond to NPR’s requests for comment.
While Article I of the Constitution has required a census every 10 years since 1790 for the once-a-decade redistribution of congressional seats, it’s not clear whether the results of a census taken years before 2030 can be used for reapportioning each state’s share of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and votes in the Electoral College.
Trump’s latest push renews similar efforts from his first administration that sparked legal battles. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately stopped a question about a person’s U.S. citizenship status from being added to 2020 census forms but declined to rule on whether people without legal status can be, for the first time in U.S. history, excluded by the president from apportionment counts.
Former President Joe Biden affirmed the longstanding practice of including the total number of persons residing in the states in those tallies with a 2021 executive order, which Trump revoked on the first day of his second term.
Using the census to ask about a person’s immigration status has yet to be tested by the Census Bureau.
But research by the bureau shows that using the once-a-decade tally by the federal government to ask the question “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” is likely to produce faulty self-reported data and discourage many households with Latino or Asian American residents from getting tallied in official population totals, which are also used for dividing up trillions in federal funding for public services in communities across the country.
The bureau’s researchers have also warned that attempting to produce neighborhood-block level citizenship data with a new census question would be “very costly,” harm the quality of other demographic statistics the census produces and yield “substantially less accurate” data than information available from existing government records about people’s citizenship status.
The Supreme Court found the first Trump administration’s stated justification for a census citizenship question — to better enforce the voting rights of racial minority groups — appeared “contrived.” As a result, Trump issued a 2019 executive order that spelled out other reasons for producing citizenship data that would be more detailed than the estimates the bureau already releases.
They included informing immigration policy and eligibility rules for public benefits, and coming up with a count of people in the U.S. without legal status. Another reason the order outlined was allowing state and local governments to draw voting districts that do not account for children and non-U.S. citizens. That radical departure from current standard redistricting practices would be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,” a 2015 report by a Republican redistricting strategist concluded. Its legality is an open question before the Supreme Court.
A 2020 presidential memorandum ultimately confirmed another goal for Trump’s first push for a citizenship question — data that would allow for the unprecedented exclusion of immigrants in the U.S. without legal status from what are known as the congressional apportionment counts.
Trump’s call for a new census comes amid growing support among Republican members of Congress in recent years to use the next decennial head count to tally non-U.S. citizens living in the country and then subtract some or all of those residents from the apportionment counts.
The action also follows sweeping executive orders by Trump aiming to curb illegal immigration and expand requirements for proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote.
The Trump administration’s latest push to change the census is expected to be challenged with lawsuits.
Additionally, if Trump is referring to the 2030 census, legal experts say that Trump’s successor or Congress may — in 2029 — have an opportunity to get rid of any added question about a person’s immigration status before it’s printed on paper forms for the 2030 census.The Trump administration’s renewed focus on excluding U.S. residents without legal status from the census, however, could fuel public reluctance to participate in the national count, particularly among immigrant communities and Latinos.
While officials in the first Trump administration often emphasized that some past national head counts have asked about people’s U.S. citizenship status in some way, census records going back to 1820 show that Trump’s proposal bucks centuries of precedent. The federal government has never before used the census to directly ask for the citizenship status of every person living in every household in the United States.
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
