Trump administration proposes excluding noncitizens from 2030 census count

The Trump administration proposed sweeping changes to the 2030 census on Wednesday, moves that would exclude noncitizens without green cards from the population counts used to divide up seats in the House of Representatives, according to a filing in the Federal Register.

The proposal would also eliminate the census questions on race and ethnicity, reversing standards adopted under the Biden administration that had added categories such as “Middle Eastern or North African,” and would bar the Census Bureau from asking about sexual orientation, according to NPR.

Apportionment, the process that determines how many House seats and Electoral College votes each state receives, has historically been based on a full count of everyone living in the country regardless of immigration status. The Trump administration argues in the filing that people in the country without legal status “are not true inhabitants, members of the body politic,” and should not be counted for that purpose, according to Roll Call’s reporting on the proposal.

The Fourteenth Amendment states that House seats are to be apportioned based on “the whole number of persons in each state,” language that has been interpreted for more than a century to include all residents. A 2020 Pew Research Center analysis cited by Roll Call estimated that excluding noncitizens without legal status from the count would have shifted three House seats, with California, Florida and Texas each losing a seat to Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio. A separate 2025 study found the change would have had a “roughly neutral effect on House control” nationally when applied retroactively to elections since 1980.

New York Attorney General Letitia James said her office is reviewing the proposal. “We stopped the Trump administration’s census attacks in 2020, and we’re exploring our legal options to fight back again,” James said, according to Roll Call.

The push follows a similar effort during President Trump’s first term to add a citizenship question to the census, which Democrats blocked through amendments to spending legislation. The current proposal also tracks recommendations laid out in Project 2025, the policy blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation, which called for including a citizenship question in the census.

Civil rights advocates and researchers told NPR the removal of race and ethnicity questions would make it harder to enforce federal anti-discrimination and voting rights laws, which rely on demographic data to identify patterns of discrimination in housing, lending and elections. Census advocates also told NPR they worry the changes could reduce participation in the 2030 count, particularly among Latino residents, who have historically been undercounted.

Under the proposed timeline, the Census Bureau must submit a report to Congress on its final list of planned questions by April 1, and federal agencies would have until September 28, 2029 to align their own data collection with any new demographic standards, according to the TPR report.

The proposal is expected to draw legal challenges once finalized. Redistricting after the 2020 census, which did include a full population count, already prompted years of litigation over state legislative and congressional maps.