Back in July, we flagged that the Trump administration would try to redefine who “resides” in the U.S. for census purposes, excluding certain immigrants from population counts used for congressional apportionment. Now there’s an actual draft rule in the works: Talking Points Memo has obtained the Commerce Department’s draft, which confirms the plan. The rule hasn’t been formally proposed yet, but the draft removes any doubt about what’s coming.
Talking Points Memo reports:
Lawful permanent residents, “approved asylees” and “approved refugees” would still be counted at their defined U.S. residence. “All other citizens of foreign countries,” the draft states, would not be counted at all.
Redistricting Online, covering the same document, adds that the rule would also ban questions about race and ethnicity:
Ending collection of race and ethnicity data would remove the block-level demographic detail used to draw districts and to litigate claims under the Voting Rights Act. The Commerce Department submitted the underlying rulemaking request in June 2026, and the proposal remains in White House review. ... The rule has not been published in the Federal Register, and no public comment period has opened.
Excluding millions of immigrants from the count used to allocate congressional seats and federal funding would be an unprecedented break from two centuries of census practice. And stripping out race and ethnicity data would gut the tools courts and researchers use to detect discrimination in redistricting. Both changes happen to serve the same partisan interest to shift political power away from the diverse, immigrant-heavy states and districts that tend to vote against the president’s party.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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