Are Democrats Already Trying to Rig the 2030 Census?

The 2026 midterm elections are still days away, but a legal battle is already brewing that could have a drastic effect on congressional and presidential races a decade from now.

November 2 – the day before Election Day – is the last day that the Department of Commerce is accepting public comments on a proposed regulation that would exclude noncitizens without permanent resident status from being counted for apportionment purposes in the 2030 census. The move is aimed at stopping Democrat states from unfairly gaining more U.S. House seats and Electoral College votes thanks to large illegal alien populations.

According to the Constitution, the country conducts a census every ten years and then uses that data for congressional apportionment, or determining the number of U.S. House seats that each state gets. As Republicans have long pointed out, counting illegal aliens in the census incentivizes states to adopt dangerous “sanctuary” policies that protect them from deportation.

States also have a financial incentive to boost their population numbers, as the population of a state can determine how much money it gets for highways, Medicaid, education, and other government programs. But the purpose of these dollars should be to fund services for American citizens, not illegal aliens and noncitizens.

The Trump administration’s proposed rule states that “illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, as they are not true inhabitants.” As the Census Bureau put it, illegal aliens also are not “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 [country].”

In other words, the Trump administration is arguing, the Framers of the Constitution never intended for people who broke American laws and entered the country illegally to count toward congressional apportionment.

Counting illegal aliens in the census is hardly a trivial matter. The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which supports limits on both legal and illegal immigration, found that “immigration affected the distribution of 17 House seats in the 2020 Census, with a net gain of 14 seats for Democratic-leaning states.”

“Because of the way reapportionment and redistricting work, immigration, including illegal immigration, redistributes political power in Washington,” Steven Camarota, the study’s author, said. “This redistribution is directly proportional to the scale of legal and illegal immigration and exists independent of whether or how immigrants themselves vote.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller similarly argued that Democrats “fought tooth and nail to include illegal aliens in the census – 20 to 30 House Democrat seats wouldn’t exist but for illegal aliens.”

Even the left-wing Brennan Center for Justice has acknowledged that by “excluding millions of individuals from the count, states with significant immigrant populations may lose congressional seats, while other states may gain or retain seats they otherwise would have lost.” While criticizing the latest proposal, the think tank agrees with conservatives on how illegal immigrants bolster Democratic states: “Removing large numbers of immigrants from the redistricting numbers could shift district boundaries away from areas with significant immigrant communities.”

This year’s pending regulation builds on high drama from the first Trump term when the administration attempted to exclude illegal aliens from the 2020 Census.

In 2018, the administration announced that the 2020 Census would ask respondents whether each person in the household was a U.S. citizen. Democrats sued, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. While the Court did not rule that a citizenship question was inherently unconstitutional, the justices said that the administration’s justification was inadequate and blocked the plan.

Then, in July 2020, Trump ordered the Census Bureau to exclude illegal aliens from population totals used to apportion U.S. House seats. However, Trump left office before the policy could be implemented, and Joe Biden revoked the order soon after taking office, so illegal aliens were included in the apportionment count.

Now, Trump is taking action early to stop the practice of allowing Democrat states to use illegal aliens to juice their apportionment numbers and federal allocations for the next census in 2030.

Congressional Republicans support the change, with Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) noting that many Democrat states lose U.S. citizen residents but then “[backfill] the mass exodus with illegal immigrants so that they do not lose their seats in Congress or their electoral votes, hence artificially boosting their political power and in turn diluting the power of other Americans’ votes.”

Democrats are predictably lining up once again to oppose the change, promising a protracted legal battle. “This rule is yet another attack on democracy by Donald Trump,” Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ) said – apparently missing the irony in arguing that giving more political power to Democrat states for illegal aliens who (technically) can’t vote is somehow “democratic.”

Opponents of the Trump administration’s regulation argue that the Constitution clearly says that “the whole number of persons in each State” should be counted in the census.

But as the administration has pointed out, there is a distinction between counting illegal aliens in the census and using their numbers to apportion House seats among the states.

There is also a compelling legal case that “whole number of persons in each state” doesn’t necessarily mean every human being physically present on the day the census is taken. For instance, foreign tourists and diplomats have never been counted in the census.

“In each state” has historically been understood to mean only those individuals whose “usual residence” is that state. The Trump administration says that people residing in the country illegally lack the type of lawful, enduring connection to a state that warrants increasing that state’s congressional representation – they are not “usual residents.”

Ultimately, the question will likely be decided by the Supreme Court. The justices punted on the issue twice during Trump’s first term, but avoiding it a third time looks like it will be more difficult.

From a political standpoint, the question could have enormous consequences. While the Trump administration is deporting illegal aliens at a record clip, as many as 10 million or more flooded into the country during Biden’s presidency – and most went to Democrat states. Should Democrats succeed again at rigging the census to boost their congressional representation, it could prove disastrous for democratic legitimacy.