President Donald Trump said Thursday that he has instructed the Commerce Department to start a new U.S. census that will be "based on modern day facts and figures" and won't include undocumented immigrants.
"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," the president wrote on Truth Social. "People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS."
Asked to clarify Trump’s plan and what information from last year’s presidential election the president was referring to, a Commerce Department spokesperson did not directly answer those questions.
“The Census Bureau will immediately adopt modern technology tools for use in the Census to better understand our robust Census data. We will accurately analyze the data to reflect the number of legal residents in the United States,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The U.S. Constitution dictates certain terms for the decennial census, with Article 1, Section 2 saying that representation in Congress will be determined by “adding the whole Number of free persons” and that the apportionment of congressional representation shall be conducted “every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.”
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution expands the qualifications for being counted in the census and in reapportionment to "the whole number of persons in each state."
A census plan that leaves undocumented immigrants out of the count would likely face legal challenges.
In a statement, John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, condemned Trump's statement and predicted the proposal would be blocked by federal courts.
"This is a comprehensive campaign to flout the U.S. Constitution in order to predetermine election outcomes so he can consolidate his power and avoid accountability to the American people," Bisognano said. "The U.S. Constitution is clear: all persons must be counted every decade as part of the census. This attempt to manipulate the census data was stopped in court in 2020, and if he follows through with this authoritarian proposal, it will be stopped again.”
Trump has long pondered the question of citizenship as it relates to the census. During his first administration, he sought to have a citizenship question on the 2020 census, but was shot down by the Supreme Court.
At the time, the Trump administration planned to include all people in the U.S. in the census regardless of citizenship. But Trump and then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross also planned to ask whether respondents to the census were citizens of the U.S.
Independent analyses, including by the Census Bureau at the time, found that millions of people could go uncounted if they were presented with a citizenship question on the census.
In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the federal government has the right to ask about citizenship on the census, but that the administration did not properly justify why it hoped to change the long-standing practice of not including the question in the census.
Afterward, Trump sought to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census, and he was buoyed by the Supreme Court's dismissal of a challenge to that plan in December 2020. Although the decision would have allowed Trump to move forward with the plan, the subsequent swearing-in of Joe Biden as president prevented him from implementing it.
Other questions about the census — including whether it should be conducted by random sampling or by a direct count — have long plagued presidential administrations confronted with the task of counting every person in the U.S. every 10 years.
Though the next presidential administration would be in charge of administering the 2030 census, the Trump administration would still oversee the beginning of the process, including a determination about what questions would be asked.
According to the Census Bureau, federal statutes require the agency to notify Congress of general census subjects three years before the decennial count, and of the actual questions to be asked two years before the count.
