Trump administration proposes excluding noncitizens, dropping race questions from 2030 census

The Trump administration on Thursday formally proposed the most sweeping rewrite of the census in generations, moving to exclude millions of immigrants from the population counts that determine how many seats each state gets in the U.S. House of Representatives and to stop asking Americans about their race, ethnicity or sexual orientation.

The 23-page draft rule, signed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and published Thursday in the Federal Register, would redefine who counts as a "usual resident" for the 2030 census. Under the proposal, only U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents would be tallied in the apportionment totals that decide how the 435 House seats — and, by extension, Electoral College votes — are divided among the states. Everyone else living in the country without a green card, including people without legal status, visa holders, foreign students, guest workers, refugees and asylum seekers, would be left out of that count.

The plan also proposes stripping questions about race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and domestic partnership from the census questionnaire, while adding a citizenship question — an idea the first Trump administration pursued and abandoned in 2019 after the Supreme Court blocked it and lower courts found evidence the effort was designed to help Republicans and white Americans at the expense of Latino communities.

The numbers

The filing itself argues that people in the country illegally "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," and should therefore be excluded from the head count the Constitution requires every ten years. A public comment period on the proposal runs 30 days from Thursday's publication, putting the deadline in mid-October, after which the Census Bureau could move to finalize the rule ahead of the next constitutionally mandated count, due to be conducted in April 2030.

According to Pew Research Center estimates cited in coverage of the proposal, roughly 16 million people in the United States lack permanent legal status — a population several times larger than the group Trump's first-term effort targeted, since this proposal extends beyond people who are undocumented to also exclude lawfully present immigrants who fall short of green-card status. A separate 2020 Pew analysis found that removing undocumented immigrants alone from the apportionment count could have shifted three House seats, costing California, Texas and Florida representation while adding seats in Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio. Because the new proposal reaches further than that earlier one, demographers say the number of seats in play could grow.

How we got here

The fight over who counts in the census is not new. Trump tried in 2019 to add a citizenship question to the census questionnaire, a move the Supreme Court blocked after finding the administration's stated rationale was "contrived." He then issued a 2020 memorandum ordering that undocumented immigrants be excluded from apportionment counts, an effort courts also stopped before Trump left office, with New York's attorney general among those leading the legal challenge that unwound it.

This term, the administration revived the push almost immediately, ordering the Census Bureau to test a citizenship question ahead of a planned 2026 test count and installing new political appointees inside the bureau. Thursday's proposal goes considerably further than those earlier moves, formalizing the exclusion of noncitizens as a standing regulation rather than a one-off directive, and pairing it with the elimination of the demographic questions that have shaped how the government tracks discrimination and allocates resources.

Who is affected

Because House seats, legislative districts and roughly $2.8 trillion a year in federal funding are all distributed using census data, the practical effects would fall hardest on states with large immigrant populations, including California, Texas, New York, New Jersey and Florida. Removing race and ethnicity questions from the short form would also strip data that civil rights lawyers currently use to prove discrimination in redistricting cases brought under the Voting Rights Act, and that federal agencies use to enforce fair-housing and fair-lending laws.

Advocates for accurate counts also warn of a broader chilling effect: fear generated by a citizenship question and the prospect of exclusion could depress participation even among citizens and legal residents in immigrant households, understating the population of entire communities regardless of how the final rule is written.

Reaction

President Trump previewed the move on social media before the filing was made public, writing on Truth Social that "People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS."

Opposition was immediate. New York Attorney General Letitia James, who helped lead the successful 2020 litigation against a similar effort, signaled she is preparing to sue again.

"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." — New York Attorney General Letitia James

Civil rights groups raised similar alarms. Meeta Anand of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said the changes could be "earth-shattering" for a data system that underpins large parts of American governance, while William Roberts of the Center for American Progress called the plan "a flagrant assault on our democracy, designed to manipulate voting maps and dilute the political representation of diverse American communities." Both organizations argue the exclusion of noncitizens conflicts with the 14th Amendment's requirement that apportionment be based on "the whole number of persons in each state," a phrase that has historically been read to include everyone regardless of immigration or citizenship status.

Roll Call, which first detailed the filing, noted the proposal could reshape the balance of power in Congress for a decade, and NPR reported that demographers and former Census Bureau officials were still assessing how the new residence criteria, which would lean on tax, immigration and benefits records to sort out who has "comparable" status to a green-card holder, would work in practice.

What happens next

For now, the proposal is just that — a draft rule open for public input, not a final regulation. The Commerce Department and Census Bureau will need to review comments submitted during the 30-day window before deciding whether, and in what form, to finalize the residence criteria and questionnaire changes. Given the scale of the shift and the history of the underlying legal fight, litigation is widely expected the moment any final rule is published; James's office and other Democratic state attorneys general who successfully challenged Trump's first-term census maneuvers are widely seen as the likely lead plaintiffs.

Congressional Democrats, who have held multiple hearings this year accusing the administration of trying to manipulate census counts ahead of the 2030 reapportionment, are expected to press the issue further as the comment period unfolds, while Republicans have generally backed the administration's position that only citizens and permanent residents should be counted for purposes of representation. With the 2030 census still roughly four years away, the coming months of rulemaking, public comment and near-certain court fights will determine whether the count Americans take for granted every ten years looks fundamentally different the next time it happens — and whether it holds up under judicial review that has twice turned back similar efforts before.