Trump’s latest plan to rig the congressional map for Republicans long after he’s gone

President Donald Trump is playing the long game in his efforts to gerrymander Republicans into power by any means necessary, even when he’s no longer in office.

His administration this week proposed a set of changes to the 2030 census that would for the first time exclude non-U.S. citizens from the population count. The proposal would also eliminate key race and ethnicity questions.

The changes would directly impact how the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states as well as a state’s number of Electoral College votes, which are determined by the census count. The changes, if they take effect, would siphon seats from blue states with larger populations of undocumented immigrants, handing more power to Republican-controlled states.

Trump made clear politics was a key consideration when he personally directed the U.S. Census Bureau to make the changes, saying it would be based on “results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024”.

“People who are in our country illegally will not be counted,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last August.

The Census Bureau published the proposal on Wednesday. It’s allowing the public to weigh in on the issue until Oct. 13 before it issues a final rule.

The agency said it “has preliminarily determined that, under the best reading of the Constitutional mandate, illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, as they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a ‘usual residence’ in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States.”

The “among others” the administration parenthesizes would likely include asylum seekers and refugees who are lawfully in the U.S. but without a green card or more permanent residency status.

Article I of the Constitution mandates that the census count all “Persons” living in a state and makes no reference to citizenship being a requirement for inclusion in the tally. The 14th Amendment also requires that congressional districts be assigned based on the “whole number of persons in each State” with no reference to citizenship. The first Trump administration had attempted to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, but the U.S. Supreme Court kicked it back for further review. The Trump administration instead tried to gather the citizenship data by other means.

The administration’s new argument for excluding undocumented immigrants and noncitizens is based on its interpretation of the word “persons” in Article I of the Constitution, which originally calculated state representation in Congress counting only three-fifths of the enslaved population. The 14th Amendment later overrode that. The administration argues that the Constitution may not have used the term citizens, but that the drafters intended for the census to count only those with permanent ties to the country.

“One of the primary legal arguments against including illegal aliens in the apportionment count is rooted in the understanding that the term ‘persons,’ as used in the Apportionment Clause of Article I, Section 2, was deliberately chosen instead of ‘citizens’ to reflect the Three-Fifths Compromise but nonetheless was largely informed by (and synonymous with) the term ‘inhabitants,’ which was historically understood to refer to members of the body politic,” the Census Bureau wrote in its proposal.

The proposal drew immediate lawsuit threats from Democrats and civil rights groups. 

“A fair and accurate decennial census is crucial to ensuring a healthy democracy. The proposed rule change is designed to deprive historically marginalized communities and immigrant-rich states – like New York – of their rightful share of political power and funding,” Murad Awawdeh, the president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition, said in a statement.

New York challenged Trump’s attempt to  add the citizenship question to the  2020 census, and state Attorney General Letitia James said she’s exploring legal options to “fight back again.”

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee also vowed to join in.

“Trump is trying to rig the Census by excluding even some legal immigrants and eliminating race and ethnicity data critical to enforcing the Voting Rights Act,” they wrote on X. “The 14th Amendment is clear: the Census is meant to count ALL people living in the United States. We will fight this.”