The Trump administration proposed on Wednesday changing the national census to include only U.S. citizens and permanent residents, a move that could significantly change how much political representation and federal funding each state receives.
The U.S. Census Bureau submitted the proposal just over a year after President Donald Trump ordered its parent agency to craft a new census that would block immigrants in the U.S. illegally from being counted. The bureau will conduct the next full census in 2030.
The proposed rule changes would exclude even more immigrants from the census, such as those in the U.S. on a temporary lawful basis. The proposed changes would also eliminate parts of the questionnaire that seek information on race or ethnicity, which have been included since the first census in 1790.
The proposal is open to public comment for 30 days.
Demography experts and civil rights advocates warn that both changes could warp the data used for drawing congressional and state legislative districts, enforcing anti-discrimination law and allocating federal funds for public services.
The effort could have “earth-shattering” effects, leaving cities and states that have relatively high immigrant populations with insufficient federal aid and political representation, said Meeta Anand, senior director of the census and data equity program at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Census data “undergirds so much of our democracy and our society,” Anand said. “So you’ll start seeing a very inaccurate picture of our country, and then we’re making political decisions, business decisions, investment decisions based on data that are flawed.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump has long decried the fact that immigrants living in the U.S. illegally are included in the census, which is used to determine how many seats each state gets in the U.S. House of Representatives and state legislative districts.
In his first term, Trump tried to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census but was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the federal government had given a “contrived” rationale.
The U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment calls for political representatives to be apportioned based on “the whole number of persons in each State.”
The administration’s effort to omit immigrants in the U.S. illegally and temporary immigrants from the U.S. census comes amid its wider crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration across the country.
The Justice Department warned on September 2 that states could lose billions of dollars in welfare funding if they do not report all immigrants whom state agencies know to be in the country illegally.
