Republicans renew a bid to remove noncitizens from the census tally behind voting maps

Republicans in Congress are reviving a controversial push to alter a key set of census numbers that are used to determine how presidents and members of the U.S. House of Representatives are elected.

Ratified after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment says the “whole number of persons in each state” must be included in what are called apportionment counts, the population numbers based on census results that determine each state’s share of House seats and Electoral College votes for a decade.

But GOP lawmakers have now released three bills this year that would use the 2030 census to tally residents without U.S. citizenship, and then subtract some or all of them from the apportionment counts. Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee unveiled the latest bill Monday.

Any attempt to carry out the unprecedented exclusion of millions of noncitizens from the apportionment counts of the 2030 census is likely to undermine the head count’s accuracy and face legal challenges, as the first Trump administration did in its failed push for similar changes for the 2020 census.

How the three bills would reshape election maps for Congress and president

More than a year ago, the GOP-controlled House narrowly passed a bill to leave out noncitizens from apportionment counts, though a divided Congress ultimately stymied that push. The current Republican trifecta, however, has opened up the possibility of getting similar legislation over the finish line.

The latest measure in Congress is a funding bill that would ban the Census Bureau from including noncitizens without legal status in the 2030 apportionment counts. A House Appropriations subcommittee is set to vote Tuesday on whether to advance the bill.

The other two bills — one reintroduced in June by Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and another in January by Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina — call for a broader group to be left out: all noncitizens, including green-card and visa holders.

None of the bills take issue with the counting of noncitizens in the overall census numbers that are used to distribute trillions in federal funding to local communities for public services each year.

To help subtract noncitizens from the apportionment counts, the bills would require census forms to include a question about a person’s U.S. citizenship status, a move that the bureau’s research has found is likely to hurt the head count’s accuracy.

The responses to a census citizenship question could also allow state and local governments to draw voting districts that do not account for children and noncitizens. In a 2015 report, a Republican redistricting strategist concluded that radical departure from current standard redistricting practices would be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,” and the Supreme Court has left its legality an open question.

The House bills put forth by Edwards and Republicans on the Appropriations Committee would also require the census to ask about people’s immigration status — a topic that the bureau’s researchers have not tested for the national head count.

Another complication could come from a bill that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia says she plans to introduce with President Trump’s support. Greene says her proposal would require a new census, as well as another round of congressional reapportionment and redistricting, before the country’s next once-a-decade head count in 2030. Under current federal law, the results of a mid-decade census “shall not be used for apportionment.”

Spokespeople for Greene, Edwards and Hagerty, as well as Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee, did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment.

The legal battle over who is included in the apportionment counts has already started

Related efforts from Trump’s first administration set off multiple lawsuits. The U.S. Supreme Court responded by blocking a question about a person’s U.S. citizenship status from being added to 2020 census forms and punting on ruling whether the president can, for the first time in U.S. history, exclude people who are living in the states without legal status from apportionment counts.

A new round of lawsuits is expected if any of the current proposals become law. John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, says in a statement that if a bill is passed and signed, “it will be challenged immediately, on clear and obvious grounds.”

Republican state attorneys general from Louisiana, Kansas, Ohio and West Virginia have already opened a legal front in this census battle. Days before Trump’s second inauguration in January, they filed a lawsuit that seeks to exclude U.S. residents without legal status and those with visas from the apportionment counts. In March, a federal judge paused that case at the request of the Trump administration, whose attorneys said that officials need time to determine their “approach” after Trump revoked a Biden-era executive order and cleared a path for attempting to alter the apportionment counts.

If the courts do not ultimately block efforts related to the 2030 census, legal experts say the administration of Trump’s successor or Congress would likely have a chance in 2029 to remove any added citizenship question before the printing of paper forms for the 2030 census begins.

Many census watchers warn, however, that renewed attention on a potential citizenship question could hurt public perception of the national count, as it did during Trump’s first term — especially among immigrant communities and Latinos, whose estimated undercount rate more than tripled in 2020 compared to a decade earlier.

Some Republicans have publicly acknowledged the constitutional hurdle facing this latest GOP push to reshape congressional and presidential election maps. In February, Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio led six fellow House Republicans in reintroducing a joint resolution that proposes amending the Constitution’s census requirements so that only the “number of persons in each State who are citizens of the United States” are included in the apportionment counts.

Such a proposal would need the approval of not only a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate, but also three-fourths of the states.

Edited by Benjamin Swasey