President Donald Trump on Thursday said he was ordering a “new and highly accurate CENSUS,” saying it will be based on the “information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024.”
“People who are in our country illegally will NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS,” he wrote in the Truth Social post announcing the move.
The census is a constitutionally mandated count of every person in the United States every 10 years, which was last conducted in 2020. A full census has never been conducted mid-decade in this manner, nor has one ever excluded noncitizens from the count.
Censuses are immensely important in American governance; each count determines how many House seats every state gets through a process called apportionment, and the results of the census help direct billions of dollars in federal, state and local funding.
Trump has been trying to include a citizenship question on the census since his first term, though the Supreme Court struck the effort down on procedural grounds in 2019. Apportionment numbers have also historically included people residing in the United States regardless of their immigration status.
A 2020 Pew Research Center report indicated removing noncitizens could cost multiple states House seats, including California and Texas.
Any attempt to do a mid-decade census would likely result in a flurry of legal and logistical challenges. Preparing for the decennial count takes multiple years, and planning for the 2030 census is already well underway.
It is unclear how the Trump administration plans to exclude undocumented people from the count, or if the president intended to just remove them from apportionment totals, which would also face legal hurdles.
The president’s announcement comes as several states have entered a redistricting battle. Trump has pushed for red states like Texas to gerrymander House maps to maintain control of the chamber, saying Republicans are “entitled” to the seats. Democrats have promised to respond in kind.
Some Republican allies of the president — including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — have urged the president to try to launch a new count, arguing the previous count was “flawed.”
The 2020 census, which was conducted almost entirely under Trump’s first term, was roiled by the pandemic. The release of the results for the census was ultimately delayed until early 2021, under then-President Joe Biden, which scuttled Trump’s attempt to exclude noncitizens from apportionment totals.
The Census Bureau acknowledged in a 2022 report that Black people, Hispanics and Native Americans were likely undercounted, while white and Asian people were overcounted. While some degree of under- or overcount happens every census, the pandemic likely exacerbated the challenge.
In January, then-Census Bureau Director Robert Santos resigned midway through his term, citing a desire to spend more time with his family. He had been appointed by Biden after his predecessor resigned following allegations from government watchdogs that he was pressuring bureau employees to rush a report on the number of immigrants in the country.
Santos’ resignation has paved the way for Trump to appoint an ally to lead the agency, although he has yet to nominate a candidate.
Planning for the census typically takes the length of a decade, so it could be difficult to conduct one soon. Even if they do wait for 2030, federal law requires that census questions be submitted to Congress two years before a count is conducted, so Trump — whose term ends in 2029 — could still influence the questions.
