A Weird Call for a Census
Terry H. Schwadron
Aug. 10, 2025
That adage about stopping the digging when you find yourself in a hole popped into front of mind as Donald Trump summarily and unconstitutionally ordered a mid-decade Census.
The hole, of course, is political. Trump’s partisans hold slim leads in both houses of Congress, face a daunting mid-term election in many districts made worse by Trump policies and his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files that are shedding support by the day.
In the last week or so, we’ve seen Trump whip Texas Republican officials into a froth to redraw state districts to gain five seats by lines that would blow up Supreme Court rulings protecting against denial of racial representation and seek to kill off Democrats altogether. And we’ve been appalled by flight of Texas Democratic state senators to avoid a vote, the calling out of the FBI to arrest those Democrats, and the promise of blue state governors to do similar, retaliatory redistricting war.
A Census, of course, is a process that helps determine both the distribution of congressional seats and billions of dollars in federal money sent to states. A new Trump-designed Census would cover up any Constitutionally questionable voter redistricting plans.
So rather than back off — and perhaps reconsider policies cutting health care access for tax cuts for the wealthy or tariffs that raise consumer prices rather than lower them — Trump is digging his Constitution-challenging hole deeper.
But talk of a new Census is not a way out, at least not anytime soon, presuming that it is a real Census and not just made up.
Excluding Non-Citizens
Trump’s announcement that the Commerce Department would start work now on a Census that specifically would exclude undocumented immigrants is problematic on multiple, simultaneous grounds.
At the outset, the declaration came as a surprise to that department, which presumably is working overtime to make real Trump’s boasts about settling trade talks with 200 nations who continue to writhe under Trump’s imposed, arbitrary, nation-specific trade tax. Preparing for and executing a national Census comes once a decade not only because that’s what the Constitution calls for, but because executing it is a huge project.
The 2020 Census just ended last year, because it is an enumeration with layers of reports that take years to sort out. That Census project took 18 months to collect data and ran a cost of about $14 billion, which, even Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill did not address and for which there is no congressional authority. Then there is the issue that Trump already wants to specify who can be counted, saying in a social media post — apparently the accepted method for learning what the president is doing — that “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS,” as if we could not understand it in lower case letters. In the first Trump administration, Trump tried this and was overruled by a federal judge. Perhaps Trump expects better treatment by the now firmly conservative Supreme Court majority that has found ways to be supportive by avoiding head-on collision with Trump.
Plus, only Trump and his immigration-whisperer aide Stephen Miller think that it is simple to determine who exactly holds legal status to be in this country, for how long and under what circumstances, including asylum application waits of years.
If it were simple, why are we hiring tens of thousands of new ICE agents, offering $50,000 bonus fees for enrollment as well as other added benefits, to hunt down the undocumented? Does Trump understand the complexities of intermarriage and inter-generationally mixed households?
All of which raises suspicions that Trump already knows how he wants a national Census to turn out politically and is prepared to bring his Sharpie pen to the problem to announce a finding before there is any fact-finding.
It’s About Fairness, Not Politics
Does Trump think a temp worker hired to survey a couple of blocks of New York City or vast areas of rural America is going to come back with highly accurate household immigration status in a weekend? Is there anyone who helps this president think things through beyond the political theater piece he puts up?
The Constitution wants all residents counted, not those whom Trump likes, with the idea that the distribution of federal monies for services be available to all populations. Yes, the distribution of congressional seats came along with that, but there was no prediction at the time that state legislatures bound to a single party would seek to draw wackadoodle-shaped lines to give one party or one people of a single race or income level or educational background the foregone conclusion in an election. Indeed, the Founders had not recognized political parties.
Even if Trump could get a new accurate read on U.S. citizen-only households, he won’t get the data until well beyond the mid-term elections and likely not effectively before the next presidential election. And even if he did, if his mass deportation campaign is successful, won’t it change the count substantially?
Trump keeps claiming that he will deport millions of people. Shouldn’t we wait until he is done in 2030?
Ironically, if all undocumented immigrants reported to be in Texas are removed, that state would lose congressional districts, not add seats, as Republicans seek to do.
There are lots of things to learn from household data collected nationwide. I doubt that Trump is spending much time looking at the growing poverty line or the increasing gap between rich and poor in this country. Discussions about obstacles presented by rent, home ownership are not big on the Trump agenda, nor is homelessness, which Census workers readily acknowledge that they cannot gauge.
If Trump thinks a new Census is a solution for election politics in close districts, someone should explain that calling an unconstitutional Census is just digging the political hole yet deeper.
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