Census Proposal Would Stop Counting Undocumented Immigrants—and Ignore Race and Sexual Orientation
The US Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, is circulating a proposed rule that would cease the collection of demographic data on racial
The US Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, is circulating a proposed rule that would cease the collection of demographic data on racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people and prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2030 census, according to documents viewed by WIRED. The decision could have far-reaching implications for federal funding, particularly in states where there are substantial numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, as well as on immigrant communities across the country. The proposed rule, which is being circulated across government agencies for review, says the census will eliminate questions about race and sexual orientation “to protect from any distortions created from the inclusion of personal questions.” The memo also states that “illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politics [sic], or persons with ‘usual residence’ in the United States.” This would likely require the reintroduction of a census question about a respondent’s citizenship.
During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Republicans attempted to add a citizenship question to the census for the first time since 1950. The effort was struck down by the Supreme Court, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the Court’s then-larger liberal bloc on the grounds that the justification for adding the question was “contrived.” The decision did not, though, find that citizenship questions are inherently unconstitutional. The Department of Commerce did not reply to requests for comment. “This is about the Voting Rights Act,” says Danah Boyd, a professor at Cornell University who studies the census, referencing the landmark voter protection legislation that the Supreme Court dismantled earlier this year. Eliminating the collection of these data, she says, would make it difficult to make basic assessments, like whether a congressional district is predominantly made of minorities. “If we don't know certain things, we can't challenge them politically,” says Boyd.
“If we don't know that certain peoples live in a particular geography, we can't say, ‘Oh my gosh, here's some massive inequality.’” Republicans and the Trump administration have long taken aim at the census. More recently, members of the Trump administration have attacked a little-known statistical method called “differential privacy,” which is used to prevent census data from being used to reidentify individual respondents, claiming that it makes the results inaccurate. In August 2025, Republican representative August Pfluger made another attempt to reintroduce a citizenship question on the census, sponsoring a bill called the COUNT Act, and in October, Republican senator Jim Banks of Indiana published a letter to Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, writing, “There is a credible argument that the framers of the Constitution designed the Census to cover lawful inhabitants and not those who are present illegally.” Census questions are set between two and three years in advance of the actual survey, based on priorities set by the administration.
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