President Donald Trump on Thursday said he has ordered the Commerce Department to re-run the count of the U.S. population that took place five years ago while excluding the counting of any person in the country without legal status.
Writing on Truth Social, Trump said he’d asked the department, which oversees the U.S. Census Bureau, to “immediately” start what he called “a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures” making use of “the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024.”
He also said the new count would exclude anyone in the country illegally.
Trump’s demand appears to be aimed at deliberately undercounting the population in large cities that often send Democrats to Congress by excluding anyone without legal status from the census count. It’s unclear how any of what he said he is demanding comports with either the U.S. Constitution and Title 13 of the United States Code, the set of laws governing the conduct of the census.
Both require the “census of population” to be conducted on April 1 at the start of every decade, with state populations reported for the purpose of apportioning House of Representatives seats by January of the next year.
And while there is a provision in the law allowing a “mid-decade census” five years into a given decade, such a survey was supposed to take place on April 1 of this year and the government is expressly prohibited by law from using it for “apportionment of Representatives in Congress among the several States” or the drawing of Congressional districts.
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