Not caring about the U.S. Constitution is a regular refrain for President Trump, who now wants to exclude undocumented people from the 2030 census count — a nonstarter as much else is in this bizarro world we now inhabit, promulgated via a screed on his Truth Social platform — is both a terrible idea and certainly a rehash.
Trump attempted something similar during his first term in office as the 2020 census closed in, deciding to suddenly include a citizenship question in the count, a move promptly blocked by the courts.
Now Trump’s trying to go whole hog and exclude the undocumented altogether, in doing so going against the plain language of the Constitution, which unambiguously mandates the count “of the whole number of persons” in each state.
The chief executive certainly seems to care less about the letter of the law and the orders of judges this time around, though these will still slap him down. It’s worth noting, though, that even if and when a judge makes the easiest ruling of a career and strikes down any directive to exclude from the census anyone based on citizenship or immigration status, that’s not necessarily mission accomplished.
Trump and Stephen Miller’s all-out campaign of shock and awe and terror against immigrants around the country is designed at least in part to create an environment of fear and concern that will discourage people from participating in all facets of civic and public life, including the mandated decennial count.
The Census Bureau itself found that it probably failed to count up to millions of noncitizens, largely because many declined to participate out of a fear that it would put them on the administration’s radar and target list. So Trump was able to accomplish some of his aims, even without the directive technically being in place, and that was in an environment less hostile than now.
New York infamously lost a House seat because it came up just 89 people short in the 2020 count, which is almost certainly a partial result of Trump’s meddling last time around. That extra seat could have made a real difference in a House of Representatives that is so narrowly controlled by the GOP, which itself seems to understand itself as a mere arm of the Trump administration.
Neither Trump, nor his top echelon of grifters and ideologues are going to be personally conducting the census count, though. That is left to a small army of temporary public servants overseen by career officials within the Census Bureau, and these folks will hopefully recall that their responsibility is to this important constitutional mandate and not to Donald Trump.
The one-time real estate promoter is fully incapable of seeing anything except in terms of monetary or political gain, and probably sees an attempt to exclude the undocumented from the census as good red meat for the base.
However, the census guides everything in the United States — not just apportionment and representation in the Congress and the Electoral College, but disaster planning, disease preparedness, allocation of federal resources, and all manner of private-sector uses like demographic data for business development and so on.
Ironically, huge chunks of those that would go uncounted under Trump’s illegal decree would be in the red states like Florida and Texas, which Trump claims to want to support. The whole idea is pointless, damaging and unconstitutional.
