Commerce Proposes Excluding Non-Green-Card Immigrants From 2030 Apportionment, Cutting Race Questions

The Census Bureau submitted a proposed rule on September 9, 2026 that would redefine “usual residence” to exclude from apportionment data anyone without permanent legal status — undocumented immigrants and also lawful temporary residents, meaning visa holders, refugees, asylees and DACA recipients. The rule’s stated basis is that such people lack “a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States” and are therefore not inhabitants with a usual residence. It applies to the 2030 census.

Two further changes travel with it, and the second is arguably larger than the headline.

The proposal adds a citizenship question to the questionnaire — the same instrument the Supreme Court blocked in 2019 in Department of Commerce v. New York, where the Court found the stated rationale pretextual after the Hofeller files surfaced.

And it reduces the demographic information collected on race and ethnicity. Race has been asked on every census since 1790. Those responses are the evidentiary basis for proving racial discrimination in redistricting — the data a Section 2 plaintiff uses to establish a violation. Read against Callais, decided in April 2026, which reworked the Gingles standard so that Section 2 compliance can no longer justify race-conscious mapping, the sequence is legible: the doctrine that required majority-minority districts was narrowed first, and now the dataset that would document their absence is proposed for reduction. A right that survives on paper without the data needed to prove its violation is a different thing from a right.

The apportionment arithmetic is contested and should be reported that way. A 2020 Pew analysis found that excluding undocumented immigrants alone would have moved about three House seats — California, Florida and Texas losing, Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio gaining. A 2025 PNAS Nexus study found the effect on House control and the Electoral College since 1980 to be roughly neutral at the national level. The proposal before the public is broader than what either modeled, since it excludes lawful temporary residents as well, so neither estimate is a forecast of this rule.

The constitutional question is textual. The Fourteenth Amendment directs apportionment by “the whole number of persons in each State.” The rule argues that the clause nonetheless permits excluding people present unlawfully. Courts blocked a narrower version of this in 2020; the Supreme Court then held the challenge premature rather than resolving the merits, leaving the question open.

Sourcing note. The proposal date, the “usual residence” redefinition, the excluded categories, the citizenship question, the race-data reduction and both seat-shift studies are confirmed across Roll Call, NBC, The Hill and Al Jazeera. Not established here: the comment-period length and deadline, and whether the “durable and indefinite” phrasing reported in the capture ledger appears in the rule text as a standard or is a paraphrase — the Federal Register document itself has not been pulled and would settle both. Do not cite that phrase as rule language without it.