Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution says that apportionment of congressional districts “shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons.” To follow that mandate, Congress authorized the first census of the United States in 1790. It numbered all “inhabitants” but omitted “Indians not taxed, and distinguishing free persons … from all others.” Since then, as the government has vastly exceeded its constitutional limits with, for example, seemingly countless programs that redistribute income, the census matters even more.
Today, the U.S. Census Bureau says it “collects data from all foreign-born who participate in its censuses and surveys, regardless of legal status.”
In 2019, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to exclude illegal aliens from the 2020 census by adding a citizenship question, though the courts blocked him on procedural grounds. The Supreme Court halted the administration’s move because its reasoning was “contrived,” and the Commerce Department withdrew the question. Now, he wants to try again, and he’s very explicit about his purpose.
“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,” he wrote on Truth Social. “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS.”
A mid-decade census is unlikely to actually happen for numerous reasons, but it’s also possible Trump is looking ahead to 2030. Either way, he’s busy lately highlighting various election-related numbers. I’ve written in the last week about the Texas Republicans’ plan to redistrict, as well as furious and hypocritical Democrat opposition. I’ve also written about the Justice Department’s moves to clean up voter rolls.
The census gambit is all part of the same basic Trump complaint: Democrats have an unfair advantage. Transparently, he also really wants to keep the House in 2026. The party holding the White House has lost seats in all but two (1998 and 2002) midterms since 1938. He’d love nothing more than to buck that trend.
Furthermore, the 2020 census — taken during the COVID lockdowns — was thoroughly botched. “The last census,” the New York Post reports, “undercounted the population significantly in many red states like Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas, while overcounting in many blue states like Delaware, Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island.” Florida and Texas, for example, were denied one additional House seat that they were entitled to. Colorado, Minnesota, and Rhode Island should probably have one fewer.
It’s hard to imagine California deserves 52 House seats without illegal aliens inflating the population, though to be fair, the same could be said of Florida and Texas. Still, Democrats surely benefit — the only question is exactly how much.
White House adviser Stephen Miller asserts that “20 to 30 of House Democrat seats wouldn’t exist but for illegal aliens.” PolitiFact rated a similar claim “false,” which I note only because of how thoroughly reliable fact-checkers always are. (Sarcasm alert!)
New York Democrat Yvette Clark basically admitted Miller was right back in 2021, saying then that her district “can absorb a significant number of these migrants” because “I need more people in my district, just for redistricting purposes.”
Don’t get me started on Democrat Illinois Representative Delia Ramirez, who recently declared (in Spanish), “I am a proud Guatemalan before I am American.” How about we count her out of Congress for explicitly violating her oath of office?
Back to the question of House seats, Democrats are far more ruthless with gerrymandering than Republicans are, carving out more House seats in blue states than their portion of the vote would indicate they should have. When you add the fact that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris allowed in 10 million illegals in just four years, dispersing them all over the country, you can imagine why Trump doesn’t want to count them.
According to The Wall Street Journal, “About half of the nation’s 48 million immigrants are not citizens, although many have immigrated legally.” The Pew Research Center said in 2022 that roughly 11 million illegal aliens reside in the U.S.
In March, however, the Center for Immigration Studies reported that there are more than 53 million immigrants, of which more than 18 million are here illegally.
Whichever numbers are correct, those are sizable percentages of the estimated American population of 342 million. By the way, being foreign-born is not necessarily the problem. Breaking and flouting our laws and/or refusing to assimilate is.
It shouldn’t be controversial to keep illegal aliens out of the country, much less out of the census that determines how American citizens are represented.
The infamous Three-Fifths Compromise at the constitutional convention in 1787 was a generous Northern offer that limited the ability of Southern states to count slaves to boost apportionment while denying voting rights for those slaves. Modern Democrats not only want to boost their apportionment with illegal aliens, but they also endeavor to create pathways to citizenship (and voting). Don’t think for a moment they’d hold those positions if they thought it would benefit Republicans — or the nation, quite frankly.
What they really hate about Trump’s voter-roll, gerrymandering, and now census efforts is that he’s playing by the rules they created.
