The Trump administration is poised to challenge a longstanding but legally fraught practice: counting illegal aliens in the U.S. census. President Trump tried to end the practice during his first term, but President Biden overturned his predecessor’s policy before it was implemented. Now, buoyed by red state attorneys general and Republican legislators, the second Trump administration is determined “to clean up the census and make sure that illegal aliens are not counted,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller said last month.

In July 2020, when the president issued a memorandum to exclude illegal migrants from the census, blue states and immigration groups challenged it in court almost immediately. Those challenges rose all the way to the Supreme Court. But it did not rule on the merits – whether all residents must be counted and if the president has the authority to exclude nonresidents – setting the stage for a battle over immigration and presidential power.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2025/06/26/who_counts_trump_poised_to_try_to_remove_noncitizens_from_census_1118884.html