The White House proposed on Wednesday (9) to stop counting immigrants without a green card in the 2030 Census and stop asking questions about race and ethnicity, as part of a reformulation that would redefine who is considered a resident of the United States in the eyes of the federal government.
The sweeping measures would radically alter a process that helps determine the distribution of congressional seats, billions of dollars in federal funding and policies designed to combat systemic disparities.
The proposed regulation published on the internet would not count non-citizens without a green card in the survey, a significant change in relation to the process that the Constitution determines to occur every 10 years.
Historically, the census asks Americans about race and ethnicity and counts all residents of the country, regardless of their immigration status.
The overhaul would also ban the U.S. Census from asking Americans about their sexual orientation.
Although the proposal will likely face legal challenges, the changes would remove from the official population count used to determine seats in Congress not only immigrants with an irregular immigration status, but also those who are in the country legally and have not yet obtained a green card or citizenship.
As a result, areas with a greater number of immigrants, which tend to vote for the Democratic Party, could lose representation and federal funds.
The proposed redesign, as well as the removal of questions about race, ethnicity and sexual orientation from the census, could have major implications for the collection of federal data used to inform anti-discrimination policies and civil rights protections.
"If we don't have the data we need to see that there are problems, we're burying our head in the sand," said Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, an organization that works with Democratic and Republican local governments on census and election-related issues. "We won't see what's going on. We won't have a sense of what happened."
An overhaul of the census count would face significant hurdles. The 14th Amendment mandates "the counting of the whole number of people in each state," not just citizens.
Additionally, the rule would affect a census count after the 2028 presidential election, so a new administration could try to reverse the changes. According to the Constitution, Congress is responsible for carrying out the census; however, he delegated decisions regarding the withdrawal to the Department of Commerce.
But some researchers said Trump's decision to try to revive his first-term initiative to overhaul the census could have a chilling effect and reduce turnout.
As part of the proposal, Washington says it is considering including a question in the census about participants' immigration status, something that, according to warnings from civil rights groups, would discourage immigrants with and without regular status from filling out the form, for fear of retaliation.
"The Trump administration is trying to exclude portions of the population that it doesn't consider true Americans," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. "And in many ways, reverse some of the important trends and policies that have taken effect since the civil rights movement of the 1960s."
The White House referred questions to the Commerce Department, which did not respond to The New York Times' requests for comment.
In the proposed rulemaking, signed by Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the administration says it is reevaluating how it collects data on race and ethnicity after "substantial questions about the meaning, relevance, and impact of attempting to categorize people by race and ethnicity" emerged in the national debate.
The proposal also cited Trump's presidential decree that eradicated initiatives aimed at diversity, equity and inclusion from the federal government.
The disclosure came after Trump last year ordered the Department of Commerce to exclude immigrants without regular immigration status from the census. "People who are in our country illegally will NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS," Trump wrote in a social media post in 2025.
This Wednesday's proposal, however, went further by also trying to exclude immigrants in regular status, but who do not have a green card.
In the project, the government argued that immigrants without regular immigration status are not "true inhabitants" of the United States because of "the lack of sufficient attachment and loyalty" to the country. And although some immigrants without a green card have regular status, the government stated in the proposal that this status is "less durable and of indefinite duration."
Trump began a similar initiative in his first term, when he tried to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. The initiative ultimately failed.
A federal court rejected the attempt, and the Supreme Court declined to intervene. Career employees at the Census Bureau, part of the Commerce Department, also resisted the government's attempts to pressure their work.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said Wednesday in a social media post that her office was evaluating legal action to challenge the president's proposed changes.
"The Constitution is clear," James said. “Every person living in the U.S., regardless of immigration status, must be counted in the census.”
