Trump calls for major changes to census amid GOP redistricting effort

President Donald Trump said Thursday that he plans to conduct a census that would not count people present in the country illegally, an order that clashes with the Constitution and would face legal challenges.

Trump wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, that he had “instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures.”

The census takes place every 10 years by law, and it was last held in 2020. It is meant to provide a full accounting of everyone present in the United States, including people living in the U.S. without authorization. It is unclear if Trump is ordering a new census to be conducted immediately, or if he is saying he wants to redesign the process ahead of the planned 2030 Census. Neither the White House nor a spokesperson for the Census Bureau responded to a request for comment.

The new census, Trump wrote, would use the “results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024” and would not count “people who are in our Country illegally.”

The order is part of Trump’s broader fight over redistricting. Typically, redistricting — the process that allocates congressional representation — follows a census. The census, which is mandated by Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, is used to determine how many seats in the House of Representatives each state receives, as well as the disbursement of billions of dollars in federal funding.

Trump has recently spearheaded an attempt by Texas Republicans to force a mid-decade redistricting effort that would consolidate Republican power in the state and probably add seats to the House that are guaranteed to be held by Republicans.

While Trump says Republicans are “entitled” to five additional seats in Texas based on the strength of his showing there in the 2024 election, the redistricting attempt has set off a nationwide fight, with Democrats responding by threatening to redistrict in deep-blue states, such as California.

A census that excludes undocumented immigrants could shrink the congressional representation of some blue states, many of which have sizable undocumented populations. But it could reduce the caucuses of red states as well.

A Pew Research Center study in 2020 found that removing undocumented immigrants from the census count would result in California, Florida and Texas — the three states with the largest undocumented populations — ending up with one fewer House seat. Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio would each hold on to one seat they would have otherwise lost, according to the study.

By redoing the census, Trump seemingly believes he will be able to strengthen Republican power further. This is not the first time Trump has tried to change the count. During his first term in office, the Trump administration made repeated attempts to influence the 2020 Census, as revealed by records obtained in a lawsuit by the nonpartisan legal organization the Brennan Center, including an effort to remove undocumented people in the United States from the count.

The Supreme Court in 2019 struck down the Trump administration’s plan to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census form sent to every U.S. household, arguing that the federal government had provided a “contrived” reason for wanting the information. Trump lashed out at the court for the decision, writing that it was “totally ridiculous” that the government “cannot ask a basic question of Citizenship in a very expensive, detailed and important Census.”

“I have asked the lawyers if they can delay the Census,” he added. The count ultimately went ahead.

The 2020 Census, which the Government Accountability Office found cost over $13 billion, was affected by the coronavirus pandemic, and the Census Bureau announced in 2022 that the survey undercounted Hispanics, Blacks and other minority groups and overcounted Whites and Asians.

Any attempt by the Trump administration to conduct a new census would be met with swift legal challenges, especially because the Constitution explicitly states that the census should happen “every subsequent term of 10 years” and the 14th Amendment requires states to count “the whole number of persons in each State.”

Adriel I. Cepeda Derieux, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s voting rights project, said the organization is prepared for a legal fight if Trump tries to go forward with dropping the undocumented population from the census count. The ACLU successfully sued to block the first Trump administration’s 2019 attempt to add a citizenship question to the Census.

“Our reaction is, ‘We’ve been here before with President Trump trying to weaponize the Census against immigrant communities and particularly against undocumented immigrants,’” Derieux said. “The goal, of course, is erasing millions of immigrants from the country with the idea they would take political power away from diverse communities where they live. Any attempt to threaten these communities in the way the first administration did … we would be ready to meet them in court.”

None of this means that Trump will not attempt to conduct a new census or that a protracted fight couldn’t happen, but because Congress codified the census in the 1950s, the legislative body probably would need to be involved, too.

Trump has yet to nominate a candidate to lead the Census Bureau after Robert Santos, who had been nominated by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate in 2021, resigned from the position earlier this year. Ron S. Jarmin is the acting director of the Census Bureau.

Whether Trump can initiate an updated census or not, he will be able to influence the 2030 Census even though his term ends in 2029. Because the process takes years to plan, the Census Bureau is required by federal law to submit the questions it plans to ask Americans no later than two years in advance, well before Trump leaves office.