US Commerce Department Cites "Allegiance" to Propose Excluding Tens of Millions from Census Count: High-Immigration States to Lose Seats and Funding

According to Al Jazeera, an internal memo released this week by the US Commerce Department recommends that the 2030 national census count only US citizens and permanent residents, excluding undocumented immigrants and legal temporary residents who do not hold green cards. The Commerce Department's stated rationale is that these individuals do not constitute "bona fide residents" and lack sufficient "connection and allegiance" to the United States. The proposal also recommends removing from the questionnaire certain racial and ethnic categories that have appeared since 1790, as well as one question on sexual orientation, and is currently entering a 30-day public comment period.

According to Pew Research Center's 2023 estimates, the United States has approximately 14 million undocumented immigrants and at least 2 million legal immigrants without permanent status; under the proposal, these more than 16 million people would not be counted in the census. Citing Pew data, Al Jazeera noted that more than half of undocumented immigrants are concentrated in six states—California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois—with roughly 2.3 million in California and 2.1 million in Texas. In other words, the states most deeply affected by the proposal are precisely those with the greatest weight in federal politics.

The US Census Bureau itself acknowledges that census data annually determines the flow of tens of billions of dollars in federal funding, covering schools, hospitals, and public infrastructure. Meeta Anand, senior director of the Census and Data Fairness Program at the civil rights organization Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told Reuters that the impact of this change could be "earth-shattering." She warned that census data "underpins so much of our democracy and society," and that once distorted, political, business, and investment decisions would all be built on a faulty foundation.

A deeper shock lies in political representation itself. The apportionment of US House seats and the drawing of congressional districts are both based on census data, as are electoral votes. Areas with high undocumented immigrant populations thus face the risk of compressed representation; once a state loses a House seat as a result, it will also lose its corresponding voice in the Electoral College that decides the presidency.

The proposal immediately encountered strong pushback on the legal front. New York Attorney General Letitia James stated clearly on the social platform X: "The Constitution is clear. Every person living in America, regardless of immigration status, must be counted in the census." She said her office is studying a legal challenge to the plan. Critics, citing the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, point out that the allocation of political representation should be based on "the whole number of persons in each State"; by using "allegiance" as the standard for filtering who is counted, the administrative memo is effectively rewriting the constitutional text by executive means. The liberal policy think tank Center for American Progress characterized the proposal as "a brazen attack on our democracy, aimed at manipulating district maps and diluting the political representation of diverse American communities," and called on citizens to petition their state representatives to oppose it.

Notably, the proposal is not an isolated move but is part of the Trump administration's broader offensive on immigration crackdowns and congressional redistricting, including restrictions on mail-in voting and other measures that activists have characterized as potentially disenfranchising minority groups. Al Jazeera's analysis holds that these measures, taken together, are intended to reshape the American electoral map through both administrative and state-level pathways.

Under the Constitution, Congress holds ultimate authority over the census, and significant legal uncertainty remains over whether the administrative memo can bypass Congress to take effect; even if it ultimately becomes law, its full implementation would come after the current administration's term. The proposal's fate therefore depends simultaneously on the outcome of the public comment period, the posture of the federal judiciary, and the political composition of Congress after the 2026 midterm elections. An institutional struggle over "who counts as an American and who deserves to be counted" has now been placed on the table.