After Trump’s Demand for a ‘New’ Census, Commerce Department Signals Intent to Infer Citizenship Figures From Existing Data

After President Donald Trump called for a new census that uses “information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024,” and excludes unlawful immigrants in a murky social media post Thursday morning, the Commerce Department has provided a little — but still not much — clarification. 

An unnamed spokesman for Commerce, which oversees the U.S. Census Bureau, responded to Democracy Docket’s request for comment late Thursday night. 

“The Census Bureau will immediately adopt modern technology tools for use in the Census to better understand our robust Census data,” the spokesman wrote in an emailed statement. 

“We will accurately analyze the data to reflect the number of legal residents in the United States.”

That response suggests that the Bureau won’t conduct a mid-decade census like the massive household-by-household counts it has undertaken every decade since 1790, but rather use existing datasets to come up with an estimate of the U.S. population minus unlawful immigrants. 

Exploring new ways of using existing Census data along with other government sources is nothing new, said Amy O’Hara, director of the Federal Statistical Research Data Center at Georgetown University and former head of the Bureau’s administrative data unit. The agency’s been researching that for decades. 

“The challenge is making it align with what the Census needs, which is to count everybody once, only once, and in the right place,” she said. 

Other administrative data sources, like the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) or Social Security Administration records, don’t pinpoint where individuals reside like the Census does, O’Hara said. “So, I would question their ability to access and appropriately use data that reflects legal residents,” she said. 

The Census already puts out annual population estimates that use de-identified data from DHS on legal permanent residents to make adjustments, but trying to use it to exclude non-citizens would be challenging. “Having led the efforts to identify reliable administrative data sources for the agency in the past, I don’t think it’s something that you can do with haste,” O’Hara said. “Administrative data were collected for their [specific] administrative purpose, [so] their utility for statistical purposes really needs to be proven.”

Trump’s demands for a new census comes as the administration has responded to its cratering approval ratings by publicly encouraging Republican-led states like Texas, Florida and Indiana to engage in mid-decade redistricting for nakedly partisan gains.

Opponents were quick to describe Trump’s Census dictate as an unconstitutional powergrab.  

“It is no coincidence that President Trump wants to manipulate the census data at the same time he is pressuring Republican states to gerrymander even more,” said John Bisognano, President of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “This is a comprehensive campaign to flout the U.S. Constitution in order to predetermine election outcomes so he can consolidate his power and avoid accountability to the American people. The U.S. Constitution is clear: all persons must be counted every decade as part of the census. This attempt to manipulate the census data was stopped in court in 2020, and if he follows through with this authoritarian proposal, it will be stopped again.”

The ACLU’s Voting Rights Project put out a similar statement, saying Trump’s order would “defy the Constitution, federal law, and settled precedent,” and vowing to take legal action to block it. 

“The Constitution and laws couldn’t be clearer: every single person in America counts, and multiple courts—including the Supreme Court—have rejected efforts to politicize the census over citizenship,” Sophia Lin Lakin, the Voting Rights Project’s director, said in a statement. “The census isn’t just a headcount. It is meant to reflect America as it is—not as some would prefer it to be—and determines how critical resources are allocated.”

The 14th Amendment of the Constitution requires that the “whole number of persons in each state” must be tallied in the Census’ decennial apportionment counts, which determine each state’s allotment of House seats and Electoral College votes. 

O’Hara also noted that Trump currently lacks authority to direct how the Bureau goes about its work. “Congress decides what a census is. A President doesn’t, the Census [Bureau] doesn’t — the Census takes its direction from the Congress,” she said. “If the Congress tells the Bureau, ‘do the census like this,’ or ‘include this or exclude that,’ the Department of Commerce, and then the Bureau of the Census, follows suit.” 

While Congress enacted a law authorizing the Commerce Secretary to call for a mid-decade census in 1976, that statute specifically prohibits its use for apportionment. 

O’Hara also questioned whether the Bureau, which has lost around 1,000 employees out of 13,000 since Trump took office, has the resources to implement the president’s orders, especially without any additional funding. “I’ll be very curious to see how this request or demand to the Commerce Department is going to be handled without disrupting other programs, [like] the regular household surveys, or the plans for the economic Census, or plans for 2030,” she said.

If Trump’s demands for a new Census are driven by a desire to boost the GOP’s odds of retaining control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections, it’s unclear how effective it would be, even assuming the administration could overcome the considerable constitutional and legal hurdles in its way.
In 2020, the Pew Research Center estimated the effect of excluding unlawful immigrants from the Census count on apportionment, finding that Alabama, Ohio, and Minnesota would each get an additional House seat while California, Texas, and Florida would each lose one seat.

Given the current partisan makeup of those states, the political impact would likely be a wash: Republicans would presumably gain seats in Alabama and Ohio while losing them in Texas and Florida, while Democrats would swap seats in Minnesota and California. To the extent either party could gain from the change, it would be through further gerrymandering in those states, which, as Texas is currently demonstrating, doesn’t necessarily require new Census data to attempt.