Trump Ordered Census Work Excluding Undocumented Immigrants; His Administration Proposed Excluding Some Lawful Immigrants From Apportionment

A Population Count Built on an Election

On August 7, 2025, President Donald Trump ordered the Commerce Department to begin work on a new census that would leave out people living in the country illegally, using information from the 2024 presidential election.¹ On September 10, 2026, his administration proposed going further, excluding some lawful immigrants too from the 2030 population used to divide House seats.²³ The charge is an abuse of executive power: Trump's administration proposed changing states' political representation by deciding that some of their residents no longer count.¹²⁴

The tie to Trump is direct: he announced the order himself, on Truth Social.¹

Truth Social post, August 7, 2025, as archived by The American Presidency Project¹

I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024. People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS.

The post supplied no method for turning election information into a population count and no budget for the new census.¹ Nor would an extra census move House seats: federal law divides them using the census taken every ten years, and provides for a mid-decade count but bars using one to divide seats or draw congressional districts.⁵⁶

The Proposal Went Beyond Undocumented Immigrants

The Census Bureau's proposal targets the count that does divide House seats: residence rules for the regular 2030 census, signed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.²³

Proposed section 60.4 would count foreign citizens who also hold U.S. citizenship or lawful permanent residence (a green card), and exclude all other foreign citizens from apportionment, the division of House seats among the states.²³⁷ The exclusion would reach some people lawfully present in the United States as well as those unlawfully present: the Bureau describes the excluded group as "illegal aliens and aliens whose legal status is less durable and indefinite in length than lawful permanent resident status."² The Congressional Research Service (CRS) says it "would potentially cover" both groups.³ The Bureau invited comments on whether other legal statuses should qualify alongside permanent residence.²

To identify who would qualify, the Bureau was considering government administrative records and third-party commercial data, and it could add a legal-status question to the census questionnaire.³²

NPR reported that the census has never excluded residents because of their immigration status, and that Trump tried and failed to subtract residents without legal status from the 2020 apportionment counts.⁸

Representation for the Whole State

The count divides 435 House seats among the 50 states, and the Constitution says whom to count.⁷⁴ The Fourteenth Amendment requires apportionment by counting the "whole number of persons in each State"; its text expressly excludes Indians not taxed, but contains no immigration-status exclusion.⁴ The Census Bureau's own explanation says resident counts include citizens and noncitizens, unauthorized immigrants, and children who cannot vote.⁷ A population census measures residents, not the electorate.⁷

If the exclusion takes effect, residents historically counted toward their states' representation would be removed from that calculation, potentially shifting House seats.³ States with the most such residents would shrink most, and a state losing a seat loses an electoral vote: its electoral votes equal its senators plus representatives.³⁹ Citizens there would share the loss: the seat belongs to the state, not to the excluded immigrant.⁷⁹

The Case for Exclusion and Its Answer

The Bureau's first defense is that the Constitution itself excludes people without sufficient enduring ties and allegiance to the United States, including undocumented immigrants and some other noncitizens.² Its second, in the alternative, is that Congress gave census officials discretion to define residence as more than physical presence.² It cites Franklin v. Massachusetts, in which the Supreme Court upheld counting federal employees stationed overseas toward their home states.² The 2020 rules also excluded foreign visitors on vacation or business.²³

The Fourteenth Amendment counts persons rather than citizens, and the people this proposal would remove from that count live here.²⁴ NPR quoted Adriel Cepeda Derieux, deputy director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, saying the interpretation "would fly against centuries of constitutional tradition and law"; the ACLU was considering a suit.⁸

A Proposal, With Political Power at Stake

As of October 10, 2026, the change for 2030 remained a proposal, with the comment deadline extended to November 2.¹⁰

Trump promised a "new and highly accurate" census.¹ No test CRS describes shows that removing residents from the apportionment count improves accuracy; the tests included a citizenship question.³ The Bureau is considering administrative records and a legal-status question to determine whom to count under the proposal.² A 2019 test found no statistically significant difference in overall self-response rates, but significantly lower rates in some areas and subgroups, including some Hispanic respondents; results of a 2026 test that included a citizenship question had not been released as of September 28.³

This census push was one of several efforts by Trump's administration to change election rules through executive action.¹¹¹

Trump publicly ordered work on a census without undocumented immigrants; his administration then proposed removing them, and some lawful immigrants, from the count that allocates House seats.¹²³ The charge is an attempt by his administration to redistribute political representation, House seats and electoral votes, through an immigration-status test, where the Constitution commands a count of persons.²⁴⁹ It belongs in the case for impeachment because the President's authority over a department is a public trust, not authority to decide which residents deserve representation.⁹⁴