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Donald Trump has announced plans for a new census that will exclude “people who are in our country illegally”, in the president’s latest move to reshape the US’s most important economic institutions.
The president said in a Truth Social post on Thursday morning that he had instructed the Department of Commerce “to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024”.
Trump added: “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS.”
The Trump administration has made attempts to deport undocumented immigrants a cornerstone of its policymaking, launching a sweeping crackdown on people it says are in the US illegally.
Trump has also intervened in the management of vital economic institutions, with the president last week sacking the head of the country’s labour statistics agency and criticising the head of the Federal Reserve.
The US census, which is mandated by the constitution and has been conducted every decade since 1790, is widely considered to be one of the most important and impactful economic reports.
Officials at the commerce department’s Census Bureau endeavour to count every US resident — citizens and non-citizens — sending out surveys and employing an army of “enumerators” to knock on doors to collect data.
The census is used to calculate how many seats each state receives in the US House of Representatives. It also matters for the distribution of federal funding, along with economic policymaking and infrastructure planning.
The most recent census, in 2020, put the US population at 331,449,281 and was the 24th to take place.
While the census does not specify how many people are in the country unlawfully, the Pew Research Center estimated in 2022 that 11mn people in the US were undocumented.
Trump sought to add a question asking whether respondents to the census were US citizens during his first term. However, it ultimately scrapped the plan after the Supreme Court ruled that his administration’s rationale for adding such a query was unconvincing.
A question about citizenship started appearing on the census in 1820, but it was removed in 1950 as officials worried about its impact on the survey’s accuracy.
More than 13,000 people permanently work for the Census Bureau, but it employs hundreds of thousands of temporary workers in order to conduct the polls. The Census Bureau could not be immediately reached for comment.
