Trump administration proposes dramatic overhaul of 2030 census that changes who counts as living in America

Por Ben Johansen — POLITICO – TOP Stories

The Trump administration proposed a sweeping overhaul of how people in America are counted in the 2030 census on Wednesday, including moving to exclude immigrants in the country illegally from the population totals used to determine political representation and not asking every American about their race and ethnicity.

Under a proposed rule released online by the Census Bureau, the agency would change its definition of a person’s “usual residence” — the standard that has long determined where someone is counted — to omit undocumented immigrants from the count used to divide seats in the House of Representatives among states.

The proposal would also exclude some immigrants who are legally in the country but do not have lawful permanent resident status, a potentially significant expansion beyond President Donald Trump’s previous attempts to remove undocumented immigrants from the population count.

In a separate major change in the filing, the bureau is proposing to prohibit questions about race and ethnicity on the short-form census form and other questionnaires used to enumerate the population. The rule would also prohibit questions about sexual orientation.

The changes, if approved and implemented for 2030, would have enormous political consequences. Census results determine how the 435 seats in the House are apportioned among states and form the basis for redrawing congressional maps. Race and ethnicity data collected through the census are also used to produce population data states receive for redistricting and to help enforce the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights laws.

While Trump will not be president during the 2030 count, planning and preparation for the constitutionally-mandated decennial enumeration is already well underway.

The count also helps determine how much federal money is sent to each state.

The proposal would mark a fundamental change in how the government determines who counts as part of a state’s population. The 14th Amendment calls for House seats to be apportioned by “counting the whole number of persons in each State,” rather than citizens, and for more than two centuries the census has generally relied on where a person lives to determine that count, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status.

In its new proposal, the bureau now argues undocumented immigrants should not qualify as usual residents “due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance” to America.

The bureau is proposing to count lawful permanent residents while excluding undocumented immigrants and people whose legal status is “less durable and indefinite” than a green card. That means the proposal could reach beyond undocumented immigrants to exclude some people who are legally living in the U.S., depending on how the bureau ultimately defines which immigration statuses qualify.

It is still considering exactly how to make those determinations, including through government records from agencies such as the Departments of Homeland Security, Treasury and State.

The proposal amounts to a new approach to the fight Trump waged during his first term when the 2020 census was being planned, during which his administration sought to exclude undocumented immigrants from the numbers used to divide House seats among states.

The effort prompted several legal challenges and ultimately failed after President Joe Biden’s nascent administration ended Trump’s efforts to not include every person in America in the count. The scheduled 2020 census release was delayed into Biden’s term due to pandemic-related delays.

In both Trump’s first and second terms, his administration has exercised an unusual amount of control over the census.

The Census Bureau director appointed by Trump and confirmed by the Senate in 2019 resigned at the beginning of Biden’s term after an outcry from Democratic lawmakers following a watchdog report that he was pressuring employees to rush to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the count.

Trump also said in August 2025 that he was going to order a new census and that “people who are in our country illegally will NOT BE COUNTED” — an idea the administration ultimately did not follow through with.

New York Attorney General Letitia James slammed the proposed change Wednesday morning, saying, “The Constitution is clear. Every person living in the United States, regardless of immigration status, must be counted in the census. We stopped the Trump administration’s census attacks in 2020, and we’re exploring our legal options to fight back again.”

The bureau also points to recent court decisions involving race and the Trump administration’s broader push against diversity, equity and inclusion programs in its rationale. It says it could instead obtain demographic information from administrative records and would remain free to ask those questions on other surveys.

The Census Bureau has historically asked about Americans’ race and ethnicity in the once-every-10-years count. It has broadly not collected data about sexual orientation in the census historically, although the 2020 count did ask about people who lived with “same-sex” partners.

“[T]he Census Bureau also is considering the (potentially) sensitive nature of questions about race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation,” the proposal reads. “Substantial doubts about the meaning, significance, and impact of attempting to categorize persons by race and ethnicity, in particular, have featured prominently in our national discourse and have been reflected in shifts in the law.”

Fonte: POLITICO – TOP Stories