For six years, President Donald Trump has been trying to fix a problem almost nobody in Washington wanted to talk about: The United States hands out congressional seats partly on the basis of people who have no legal right to be there. This week, his administration attempted a major overhaul of the United States census and finally moved to correct that, and it did so the right way, through a formal rule that will survive the scrutiny his first attempt did not.
The Census Bureau’s proposal, filed this week for publication in the Federal Register, aims to exclude illegal immigrants and certain categories of non-permanent legal residents from the population counts used to divide the House of Representatives’ 435 seats among the states. It is a long-overdue correction, and conservatives should say so plainly rather than hedge around it.
By quietly severing the link between representation and citizenship, the census has spent decades eroding a core democratic promise. The House of Representatives exists to reflect the will of the American people through the leaders they choose. Yet when a state’s congressional delegation swells because of residents ineligible to vote, the political influence of its voting citizens is diluted compared with those in states with smaller nonvoting populations.
This is no hypothetical. An analysis by the Pew Research Center found that excluding illegal immigrants from the 2020 census would have cost California, Texas, and Florida one House seat apiece, seats that would have shifted to states with fewer unauthorized residents. Correcting this imbalance is a matter of realigning congressional representation with the public that the Constitution actually intends to empower.
The U.S. administration has learned from its own history, demonstrating a discipline that deserves credit. In 2020, Trump attempted to get the same result through a hasty presidential memorandum issued near the end of his term. That initial effort collapsed under legal challenge before it could ever take effect.
This time, the U.S. Census Bureau is building its case through formal notice-and-comment rulemaking. The agency has laid out a detailed argument for why usual residence has historically meant more than mere physical presence on a given night, while inviting 30 days of public comment before any changes are finalized. Whatever a court ultimately decides, this methodical approach is how durable policy is made, and the administration deserves credit for doing it properly the second time.
Trump ran in 2024 on a promise to end the practice of counting unauthorized immigrants toward political power. Unlike so many campaign pledges, this one reached the Federal Register within the first year of his term. For the voters who supported him because they wanted someone who would actually follow through on immigration enforcement rather than simply talk about it, the proposal represents exactly what they were promised.
The rule’s critics will point to the 14th Amendment’s instruction to count the “whole number of persons in each State,” and they are not wrong that this language has been read broadly for two centuries. A 2025 study in PNAS Nexus even found that, at the national level, excluding illegal immigrants from apportionment would have made little difference to which party controlled the House since 1980.
Yet the Constitution’s mandate to count the “whole number of persons” has never meant enumerating every individual physically present on census night. Instead, it has always required determining who qualifies as an inhabitant with a genuine, lasting tie to a state, and the government has its authority to conclude that those living in the U.S. without legal permission do not meet that threshold.
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This fight will be finally settled in federal court, probably more than once, and there is no guarantee it survives intact. But the administration has done what critics of the first attempt said it should have done from the start: build the record, follow the process, and make the argument in the open rather than through a late-term executive order. Whether or not the courts ultimately agree, Trump has put the country in a position to have the debate on the merits rather than dismiss it on a technicality.
The census was never supposed to be a passive tally of everyone standing on American soil on a given April night. It was meant to translate the will of the American people into their government.
Brabim Karki is a columnist and commentator who writes for international publications including the Independent, Nikkei Asia, South China Morning Post, the Hill, Hindustan Times, the Economic Times, the Indian Express, CNN-News18, the Japan Times, and the Straits Times.