U.S. President Donald Trump looks on while hosting a reception for the reigning Major League Baseball (MLB) World Series champion at the White House, Washington, D.C., U.S., July 23, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
President Donald Trump is quietly trying to rig the U.S. Census to change the rules targeting immigrants again, a bombshell report from The Bulwark revealed on Friday.
Trump has tried one scheme before, in which his administration added a citizenship question, saying it was important for enforcing "voting rights law." This time, he appears not to want to change the counting of people not born in the U.S. again.
According to reporter Catherine Rampell, the Trump administration quietly submitted a regulatory filing. It was a notification that critics fear would ultimately try to "recategorize millions of immigrants (both unauthorized and legal) as not actually living here in the United States."
Trump has spent his first 18 months in office trying to remove as many immigrants from the United States as possible. For the ones yet to be removed, the Department of Homeland Security has them in holding cells after being snatched by immigration agents. The goal set by Trump deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was to nab at least 3,000 immigrants per day across the U.S., Axios reported. However, the administration has struggled to make that a reality.
The next step, explained Rampell, is to pretend they were eliminated.
"Through the census, it can continue the spirit of that campaign. Put another way: If you can’t deport every immigrant, you can at least remove evidence they exist," she wrote.
The way the law works currently is that the census counts every person in the country regardless of status. The goal is to understand how many people live in each location to inform financial decisions about the allocation of federal funds. The fewer people that are counted, the less funding a community may get for things like schools, health care, housing, food assistance, roads, and child programs. It can also mean less political representation and ultimately a weaker business investment too.
Rampell is concerned because thus far no one has noticed, with the exception of "hard-core data nerds."
"All that’s officially public right now about that proposed rule change is the title, which was published on an Office of Management and Budget website," she cited. That title is “Decennial Census of the Population of Americans; Proposed Residence Criteria and Proposed Regulations for Demographic Questions."
The Constitution does not define ‘resident’ in modern terms. In the original text, it required counting "the whole Number of free Persons" and, at the time, three-fifths of "all other Persons," while excluding "Indians not taxed." The latter two were eliminated by the 14th Amendment. It did not say people had to be citizens, and it did not set a time requirement for how long someone had to live in the U.S. There's no citizenship test for the census. It merely considers a "usual residence," meaning the place where a person sleeps the most often. Trump's new rules appear to be trying to change that by rewriting new criteria for what constitutes a "residence."
"In a way, this is a brilliant idea," quipped Rampell. "After all, 'residence criteria' sounds so . . . benign. It’s a thing that usually matters only to the bean-counters within the Census Bureau, who occasionally need guidance about how to categorize where someone lives on the official day of the decennial enumeration, known as 'Census Day' (always April 1, in a year divisible by ten)."
Those "bean-counters" have a whole other job calculating students who live in campus housing most months out of the year, homeless Americans, those who live abroad, etc.
She is trying to get her hands on the actual text, and put out a call to anyone who might know more. On his first day in office, Trump already eliminated a Biden-era executive order that affirmed "the longstanding practice of including the total number of persons residing in each state in those census results," NPR reported at the time.
There are already some redstates attempting to have immigrants excluded from the census in their states.