A Trump administration plan for overhauling the census could mean major changes for how millions in federal funding is allocated to states. (Photo courtesy U.S. Census Bureau)
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration wants to overhaul the U.S. census to exclude noncitizens who don’t have a green card from the country’s next population count in 2030, according to a Wednesday notice in the Federal Register.
The document, which will officially be published Thursday, could mean major changes for how millions in federal funding is allocated to states, as well as affect the population numbers for determining the number of U.S. House members in each state. The House is made up of 435 lawmakers apportioned among congressional districts in the 50 states.
The move is likely to face legal challenges, as the changes run counter to the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment that directs representatives in Congress to be appointed based on the “whole number of persons in each State,” excluding Native Americans “not taxed.”
The amendment language does not specify immigration status. The states handled immigration enforcement until the federal government took over in 1882 with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
The proposed changes would exclude any noncitizens who do not have lawful permanent residence, or a green card, which could result in millions being excluded from the population count. That would include immigrants in the country without legal authorization, those with some form of temporary legal status, refugees and asylum seekers.
The unauthorized immigrant population — that includes noncitizens who have some form of limited legal status — has grown to more than 15.8 million since mid-2024.
The Trump administration argues that noncitizens who are not green card holders should be kept out of the census count because “they 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,” according to the document.
The proposal also calls for removing several questions pertaining to sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, and suggests adding a question relating to citizenship, which President Donald Trump has pushed to include since his first term. But the Supreme Court in 2019 kept the question off the 2020 census.
The Trump administration wants those demographic questions removed from the census because the survey “should be colorblind and should not be distorted in any way by questions about immaterial personal characteristics, such as race,” the proposal says.
The census has collected information about race and ethnicity since 1790, the first survey count in the U.S.
Public comment will last for 30 days after the document is officially published Thursday.