Census Bureau Proposes Excluding Noncitizens From the 2030 Apportionment Count and Dropping Race and Ethnicity Questions

The Census Bureau has proposed a rule for the 2030 census that would exclude people who are neither citizens nor green-card holders from the population counts used to divide the 435 House seats among the states. It would also drop the questions on race and Hispanic origin. The proposal was published in the Federal Register as document 2026-18481. The comment period has been extended to 2 November, the day before the midterms.

The constitutional question

The 14th Amendment says House seats are apportioned by “the whole number of persons in each state.” Every census since 1790 has counted residents regardless of legal status for apportionment. In Trump v. New York (2020), the Supreme Court declined to rule on the President’s first-term attempt to exclude undocumented immigrants, saying the case was premature. The Congressional Research Service has noted that the text and history point to counting all residents, though the question has never been decided on the merits.

Excluding non-citizens would shift seats away from states with large immigrant populations, such as California, Texas, New York and Florida, toward states with fewer. The census doesn’t currently ask about citizenship, so the bureau would have to estimate status from administrative records, a method the bureau’s own scientists warned against in 2019.

Race and ethnicity

Dropping race and ethnicity questions would end data used to enforce the Voting Rights Act, draw districts, and allocate federal funds and civil rights monitoring. The Office of Management and Budget revised the standards for those questions in 2024. The proposal departs from them.

Lawsuits coming

Democratic state attorneys general and civil rights groups say they’re preparing suits. Members of Congress, mostly Democrats, have demanded hearings. Census law requires the bureau to report its final questions to Congress two years before the count, by 2028.

Why it matters

Apportionment sets each state’s House seats and electoral votes for a decade. The census is also the basis for distributing more than $2.8 trillion a year in federal funds. Publishing the proposal weeks before the midterms makes the census an election issue. The final rule, and the court fight over it, will come later.