President Donald Trump may have learned from his last go at manipulating the decennial census to include a citizenship question: His administration looks poised to try something different in order to target undocumented immigrants during the 2030 count, experts said in a briefing call this week.
Civil rights organizations and census experts pointed to clues that they believe show the Census Bureau will use a trifecta of new or modified survey questions on the 2030 census in an attempt to exclude certain immigrants in order to influence who is counted when the bureau calculates how many congressional seats and electoral votes each state gets.
The administration may again try to add a citizenship question to the census. But experts who spoke on a call organized by a coalition of population statistics and data advocacy organizations believe Trump and his allies are taking a more refined approach than during Trump’s first administration. As a result, Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel at the Mexican American Legal Defense Educational Fund, said he believes the 2030 census will also try to include a question about immigration status, and an amended residency question that would discourage certain immigrant respondents from listing a U.S.-based address.
“I do think they’ve become more sophisticated,” Saenz said in response to a question from TPM during the Tuesday call. The administration “understand[s] they’re not going to accomplish what they want to accomplish without a status question.”
The Census Bureau and the Commerce Department did not respond to TPM requests for comment.
Last August, Trump, via Truth Social, ordered his administration to create a “new” census that would exclude undocumented immigrants. His demand included little additional detail.
On June 25, the Commerce Department and Census Bureau posted a proposed rule title to a government regulatory website: Decennial Census of the Population of Americans; Proposed Residence Criteria and Proposed Regulations for Demographic Questions. Only the title is public for now. At the same time, two ongoing lawsuits filed against the government by states Trump won are challenging the historic practice of including undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign residents in census enumeration used for congressional apportionment and for drawing state political maps.
By June 26, the government asked for a stay in one of the cases, State of Missouri v. The U.S. Department of Commerce, citing the pending release of the government’s new rule and policy proposals.
Census watchers expect the 2030 census to try and use a residency question to designate certain immigrants — those who are undocumented, who have temporary protected status or TPS, and recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA — as having foreign primary residences. Rules from the 2020 census state that “citizens of foreign countries” living in America should be counted “at the U.S. residence where they live and sleep most of the time.”
“What we expect to see in the residence criteria put forward is some attempt to reallocate undocumented and temporarily present immigrants as not counting as residents of the United States because their residence, they will assert, is in their country of origin,” said Saenz, whose organization filed a motion to intervene in Missouri.
The census residency question has not been without its share of controversy, Allison Plyer, past chair of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee, said on Tuesday. People should identify the residence at which they live most often during the year. But, “Increasingly, we see more complexity in the U.S. and how and where people live,” said Plyer, who is currently chief demographer at the Data Center based in Louisiana. She cited respondents who split time between two states as an example.
Another lawsuit filed by Louisiana, Kansas, Ohio and West Virginia hinges in part on this policy and alleges that the “residency rule” violated the Fourteenth Amendment. That case, as well as Missouri, holds that plaintiff states and individuals were deprived of fair representation because enumerating undocumented immigrants and temporary residents inflated congressional representation for some states and siphoned off representation for the plaintiffs.
Missouri also claims that undocumented immigrants, temporary visa holders, and “foreign adversaries” don’t count as “persons” as defined by the constitutional requirement for a population count every 10 years.
Immigrants and noncitizens regardless of status have been counted in the census since the first survey was taken in 1790. Merely adding a citizenship question wouldn’t alone identify undocumented immigrants, those with TPS or DACA recipients.
“The issue actually goes beyond the citizenship question because in order to distinguish the undocumented, those with TPS with, deferred action, etc., from lawful permanent residence or green card holders,” said Saenz, “they would actually have to add a status question, which is obviously unprecedented.”
Without knowing an individual’s immigration status, it’d be impossible to differentiate between a targeted population and a Green Card holder, for example.
Identifying immigrants isn’t Trump and his allies’ only goal, Saenz said. The administration of a census requiring the disclosure of such sensitive data and coming as preparations are already underway would likely sow confusion and discourage participation among some groups.
“We know that the overarching effect,” said Saenz, “and probably one intended by this administration, would be to deter and reduce participation and increase, therefore, the undercount.”
In 2018, census officials found that the inclusion of just a citizenship question increased the nonparticipation rate more in households with at least one undocumented person compared to households with none.
My family has been in North America since before the US existed.
Trump’s mum was an immigrant from Scotland and he would 've excluded her. His dad was a son of a German immigrant yet trump hates immigrants.