WASHINGTON — As Texas moves to redraw its congressional map at the behest of President Donald Trump, the White House is pushing ahead on another proposal to safeguard GOP power in Washington that could have major implications for Texas.
Last week, Trump said he had ordered the Commerce Department to start working on a new census that does not count undocumented immigrants.
Excluding “people who are in our Country illegally,” as Trump declared on social media, would fulfill a longtime conservative priority and mark a reversal from the longstanding practice of counting all people residing in the United States, legally or not, in the once-a-decade headcount.
With an estimated 1.7 million undocumented immigrants living in Texas, the move could have major ramifications for the state’s political sway.
One of the main motivations for White House officials in pushing forward a new census is the potential to reallocate political power, including Electoral College votes, from Democrat-dominated states to ones controlled by Republicans, according to two people with knowledge of the effort who were granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations they were not authorized to publicly speak about.
The White House also sees a new census as an opportunity to correct an overcount of people in predominantly blue states from the 2020 census, which they argue gave too much political power to Democratic strongholds.
The push comes as Texas’ GOP-controlled Legislature is attempting to overhaul the state’s congressional lines to net Republicans up to five more seats — a process left in limbo by Democratic lawmakers’ departure from the state. Blue states — including California, New York and Illinois — have threatened to retaliate by crafting new districts of their own that would kick Republican lawmakers out of power.
Trump’s census proposal is all but certain to face constitutional challenges and logistical hurdles, and it would require cooperation from the U.S. Census Bureau and its staff of largely apolitical career civil servants.
But in his seven months in office, Trump has shown an unparalleled ability to bend the levers of power to his will and push the norms that have restrained previous presidencies.
How does the census determine political power?
Planning a national census is a yearslong process that typically happens once per decade, generating population and demographic data that is used to determine how billions of federal dollars are allocated and how many seats each state gets in Congress. States receive the number of districts that correspond to their total population, so that the more people living in a state, the more representatives they get to send to the U.S. House.
The census headcount also dictates each state’s footprint in the Electoral College, which is used to decide presidential elections and is based on how many House members a state elects, plus their two senators. Texas, for example, has two senators and 38 House members, giving it a whopping 40 Electoral College votes.
This distribution has long been based on the total number of people living in a given state, irrespective of citizenship. Under the Trump-backed proposal, only those residing in the country legally would be counted.
Such a change would have ripple effects across the nation. States with higher undocumented populations could see some of their congressional districts redistributed to states with fewer undocumented residents.
It’s not immediately clear how this would change the country’s political balance. California, Texas, New York and Florida — a mix of red and blue states — are among those with the highest number of unauthorized immigrants, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington-based think tank. Texas comes in at No. 2 behind California, with 1.7 million undocumented immigrants as of 2019, according to the think tank’s estimates.
Red states that are home to a disproportionate number of undocumented immigrants, like Texas and Florida, could see a decrease in their counted population, thwarting their political power and throwing a wrench in Republicans’ plans, some experts believe.
“I don’t understand how illuminating them is going to be advantageous to Republicans,” said Jennifer Van Hook, a sociology and demography professor at Pennsylvania State University.
But blue states, most notably California and New York, have seen a population exodus in recent years, primarily to Republican-controlled states. The Democrats’ top redistricting organization, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, has said it expects to see California, New York, Illinois, Rhode Island and other blue states lose seats under the traditional apportionment that will follow the 2030 census.
Meanwhile, Texas, Florida, Arizona and Georgia could add districts thanks to their massive population growth, the NDRC predicts, noting that Texas could see a three-seat pickup.
Republicans are betting population increases in red states with large undocumented populations would outweigh the losses they can expect by not counting those undocumented residents.
Referring to an overcount of some Democratic states in the 2020 census, Vice President JD Vance asserted that if the Trump administration conducted a new census, “you’d have 10 additional Republican seats and 9 fewer Democrat seats,” forecasting states like Ohio and Florida could gain political clout.
But not everyone is convinced a new census that omits undocumented residents would benefit one party over the other.
Robert Warren, a demographer at the Center for Migration Studies, created hypothetical electoral maps for each census dating back to 1980 that did not count undocumented immigrants. His research found that excluding the undocumented population had little to no effect on how congressional districts are doled out.
“It wouldn’t shift enough seats to make any difference, and that’s been true for five straight censuses,” he said in an interview with The Tribune.
Constitutional and procedural concerns
Paul Mitchell, a redistricting expert working in California Democratic politics, believes that not counting all people who live in a particular state runs afoul of the 14th Amendment, which requires House seats to be allocated based on the “whole number of persons in each state.”
“The Constitution very clearly says that apportionment is determined by the number of people, not citizens,” he said.
If Trump’s plan is carried out, it is all but certain to face legal challenges.
Trump’s firing of the head of Bureau of Labor Statistics over poor job numbers he claimed were inaccurate has disturbed some demography experts, who worry about what it portends for the accuracy of any census data obtained through atypical means.
The president’s announcement said the new data would be calculated from “modern day facts and figures,” including “information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024.”
While it remains unclear exactly how this would work, Van Hook said there’s been a fast-growing push to carry out an “administrative record census.” This new type of count would use data from other federal agencies — such as tax records, Medicare records and other government databases — to create a model of the nation without a full-fledged census survey.
But these databases are complex and incomplete, potentially proving inaccurate. An administrative records census could “leave out a lot of people who are not in official record systems,” Van Hook said, including undocumented immigrants and “people who don't really want to be found.”
Even if the accuracy met census standards, carrying out such a complex new project could prove difficult before the 2028 election.
“The Census Bureau is a giant aircraft carrier, and they have to turn everything around, and it takes them months and months and months and months to do that,” Van Hook said. “It doesn't seem plausible.”
Some legislation has been proposed to ameliorate the concerns, or at least lay the legal groundwork for an unconventional quick-turn census.
A bill by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, would require a revamp of the census before the 2026 elections. It would also give the bureau latitude to obtain the data through any method approved by the commerce secretary, “including the use of sampling procedures and special surveys.”
Another proposal, the “Equal Representation Act,” would implement a citizenship question on the 2030 census and exclude non-citizens from being counted in the apportionment of House seats and Electoral College votes. A version of the bill passed the House last year with broad support from Texas Republicans but failed to advance in the Senate.
