The 2020 directive focused on the population number used to divide House seats among states, not on removing unauthorized immigrants from the census count itself.
In July 2020, Donald Trump issued a memorandum directing the Commerce Department to provide information that could allow unauthorized immigrants to be excluded from the population figures used for congressional apportionment. The request put a difficult question before the government: how could it identify people by immigration status for that calculation when the 2020 census did not ask respondents about it?
The answer mattered because apportionment divides all 435 House seats among the states after each once-a-decade census. A change in the population base could have affected political representation for 10 years.
The data problem came first
The memorandum instructed Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to include information permitting the president, “to the extent practicable,” to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the apportionment count, according to NPR’s reporting at the time.
But the 2020 census form did not ask whether a person was a citizen or lacked legal immigration status. Estimating unauthorized immigrant populations by state would have required administrative records or other methods, and the reliability of those methods was contested.
NPR reported that a 1999 Supreme Court ruling barred statistical sampling for figures used to reapportion Congress. That left unresolved whether the Census Bureau could identify people by immigration status with enough confidence for the calculation Trump proposed.
The coronavirus pandemic had already disrupted the 2020 count as census decisions faced legal challenges. Trump’s earlier, unsuccessful effort to add a citizenship question to the census had also led to court fights and concerns about participation in immigrant communities.
What the memorandum did — and did not — seek
The policy did not direct the Census Bureau to stop attempting to count unauthorized immigrants, remove them from the census questionnaire or alter the constitutional head count itself. It addressed a later stage: which people would be included in the totals used to allocate House seats.
The census is conducted every 10 years as a count of people living in the United States. Census results are then used to reapportion House representation among the 50 states.
Every state receives at least one House member. The remaining seats are distributed according to population, so a state growing faster than other states can gain representation while another can lose a seat.
Because a state’s Electoral College total includes its House members and two senators, a change in House representation can also affect presidential-election math. Census-based totals also help shape federal funding decisions and legislative redistricting.
Constitutional language drove the legal fight
The dispute centered on the Constitution’s use of the word “persons.” The Constitution calls for an “actual Enumeration” every 10 years, and the Fourteenth Amendment says congressional representation is apportioned using the “whole number of persons in each State.”
Official census population counts have included citizens and noncitizens regardless of immigration status throughout the country’s history. NPR reported that the practice dates to the first census in 1790.
Those challenging Trump’s approach argued that the constitutional language covers residents rather than citizenship or immigration authorization. They also maintained that Congress has broad authority over census rules, rather than the president acting alone.
Supporters argued that representation should be based on people lawfully residing in the country. Alabama officials involved in related litigation said states with fewer unauthorized immigrants could otherwise lose political influence.
Opponents saw representation and participation at stake
Opponents described the proposal as an effort to use a nationwide population count to achieve a political outcome. They argued that residents use local roads, schools, hospitals and other services, and that excluding people from representation totals would reduce the formal political voice of the communities where they live.
Dale Ho, then director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, called the effort an attempt to “weaponize the census” against immigrant communities. New York Attorney General Letitia James argued that every person living in the country must be counted regardless of immigration status.
Critics also warned that the policy could make immigrant households less likely to participate in the census. They said an incomplete count could independently affect representation and federal-resource decisions.
Supporters countered that including unauthorized immigrants in apportionment could shift House seats and Electoral College votes toward states with larger immigrant populations.
Why the dispute could endure for 10 years
A shift of even one House seat can matter in a closely divided chamber. Since reapportionment follows the decennial census, the resulting distribution remains in place for a decade.
The memorandum therefore concerned more than immigration policy or census administration. It concerned the population baseline used to assign representation and the geographic distribution of political power in the United States.
The proposal exposed competing views of fairness between states and of who should count for representation. It also left two central issues unresolved: whether the government could reliably produce the needed immigration-status data and whether the approach could be squared with the Constitution’s longstanding practice of counting persons.
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