In a week when highly partisan redistricting dominated the news, President Donald Trump took a step further Aug. 7 when he said he had ordered the Commerce Department to start working on a new census.
“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,” he wrote Aug. 7 on Truth Social. “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS.”
It wasn’t clear from Trump’s social media post when he wants the next census to be held. Under current law, the next census is set for 2030.
A new census would be a sharp break with decades of precedent. Excluding immigrants in the country illegally will need to be tested in the courts, and other issues, including the timing of the census, would require consent from Congress, experts said.
A census with the changes Trump seeks likely would have a far-reaching impact on politics, especially amid Trump’s push to have Republican-led states undertake unusual mid-decade redistricting efforts to maximize congressional GOP seats. It would also affect the distribution of federal dollars to states, communities and residents.
The White House referred PolitiFact to the Commerce Department, which provided a statement: “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.”
Can Trump change the timing of the census?
Trump’s words could be read to mean he’s seeking a census more quickly than 2030. Determining whether this would be legal would come down to Article 1 of the Constitution.
Article 1, which establishes the legislative branch, says that to determine the number of seats per state in the U.S. House of Representatives, a census “shall be made … within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they (Congress) shall by Law direct.”
Under current federal law, Congress has used this power to direct the commerce secretary to undertake and publish a census every decade, in years ending in zero.
Undertaking a census more frequently than every 10 years might pass constitutional muster, because Article 1 uses the word “within” in relation to the 10-year period, said Frank O. Bowman III, a University of Missouri emeritus law professor. However, doing so would run afoul of the existing law that sets the once-a-decade timetable.
To conduct a census sooner than 2030, Congress would have to pass a law allowing an accelerated schedule.
Can Trump order that immigrants in the U.S. illegally be excluded from the census count?
During his first term, Trump sought to add a citizenship question to the Census. This question hadn’t been included since 1950.
At that time, the Trump administration argued that the president has “virtually unfettered discretion” on what data is included in the census. It said immigrants in the U.S. illegally would not have been considered inhabitants by the framers.
In lawsuits challenging this effort, a different part of the Constitution played a key role. The 14th Amendment says, “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.”
This amendment’s language — “the whole number of persons in each state” — is the linchpin of legal efforts to fight efforts like Trump’s. This wording means “it would be unconstitutional to exclude undocumented migrants,” said Ilya Somin, a George Mason University law professor.
Opponents of Trump’s efforts say many people are counted in the census who cannot vote, including children, lawful noncitizens, incarcerated people and people convicted of felonies.
Lower courts rejected Trump’s first-term arguments, and the Supreme Court in 2020 decided on procedural grounds not to weigh in on the case’s merits, letting the lower court ruling stand.
With the current Supreme Court’s conservative majority often siding with Trump, the lack of a ruling on the substance gives the justices some room to rule that Trump’s vision of a citizen-only census conforms to the Constitution.
“The current Supreme Court has a record of ignoring or reversing precedent, staying lower court decisions, and setting aside lower court decisions,” said Steven Smith, an Arizona State University political scientist. “All bets are off.”
Beyond the law, what are some of the practical challenges Trump would face?
Conducting a census isn’t something that can be planned or done quickly. It involves collecting data on more than 340 million people and hiring and training thousands of new workers.
The Census Bureau has started preparing for the 2030 count, including the recruitment of workers for an upcoming, large-scale field test in 2026.
Current law also requires that Congress be notified of the census questions two years before it’s undertaken. But Trump could urge the Republican majorities in Congress to change that law.
Any action to make census changes would almost certainly be challenged in court, adding further delays.
Experts said the likelihood of a new, national census being completed from a standing start today in time for the next elections in 2026 is all but impossible, experts said. In addition to having to conduct an entire census in record time, states would need time to approve new district lines, establish candidate filing dates and hold primaries by the November 2026 midterms.
Another potential obstacle for Trump would emerge if he demands that states draw new congressional lines using a mid-decade census. “The president has no authority to order a state to redistrict mid-decade,” Smith said. Congress could, however, change that.
Excluding immigrants in the U.S. illegally could also be tricky. On a technical level, it would require writing and testing a citizenship question. And some critics worry what such a question would mean for the census data’s overall reliability. Critics say response rates will decrease, especially amid fears that answering the census amid the administration’s mass deportation efforts could get someone mistakenly deported.
How could changing who’s counted affect the partisan balance of power?
Projections of how a census that doesn’t count immigrants in the U.S. illegally would affect the political landscape have produced varying results. But what Trump proposes might not necessarily bolster the Republican Party, analyses show.
- A 2020 Pew Research Center study found that blue California and red Texas and Florida would have had one seat less, while red Alabama and Ohio and blue Minnesota would each have had one seat more.
- A 2024 report by the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower immigration levels, found that California and New York gained eight and three seats, respectively, from including immigrants — legal and illegal — in the 2020 census. Florida gained two additional seats. Texas and Illinois, New Jersey and Rhode Island gained one each.
- A 2024 report by the libertarian Cato Institute concluded that 95% of noncitizen population growth has gone to red states since 2019.
- A January study by University of Minnesota researcher Rob Warren and Robert E. Warren, a former demographer for the U.S. Census who’s now a senior visiting fellow at the Center for Migration Studies of New York, found that including immigrants in the U.S. illegally in census data has had “minimal” impact on party representation in the House. Excluding illegal immigrants from the 2020 Census would have meant that California and Texas would have each lost one seat and Ohio and New York would have gained a seat each, they found.
“The evidence is that both red and blue places would be harmed,” said Beth Jarosz, senior program director at the Population Reference Bureau, a think tank.
This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check here.
