WASHINGTON, D.C. — Last week, President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis were asked if they would back a proposal by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to exclude undocumented immigrants from being counted in the Census. Both expressed support for it.
“Ron would love it. I would love it,” said Trump.
“We only got one seat in the last Census,” said DeSantis. “Are you trying to tell me that Florida only had one seat in that? We should have had at least two. Texas should have had another one. That could be the difference in the House of Representatives, and the majority.”
Florida currently has 28 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. 20 of those are Republican held, the second most of any state behind Texas.
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., is also co-sponsoring a bill that would require future censuses to include a citizenship question and prohibit non-U.S. citizens from being counted.
But, according to the Pew Research Center, in 2022 Florida had the third largest “unauthorized immigrant population” behind California and Texas.
“Texas and Florida are two of the leading states when it comes to the estimated number of unauthorized immigrants inside of them, and so because population is tied to a lot of federal funds and because it’s tied to representation in the House, excluding that group of individuals from those states could certainly have negative consequences for both political representation and for the types of federal funds that flow through communities,” said Director of Research at the Cornell ILR Buffalo Co-Lab, Russell Weaver.
Some say the efforts could run into constitutional challenges. The Constitution reads that, “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State…”
“It’s been examined by Departments of Justice of Democratic presidents and Republican presidents, and they’ve all come to the same conclusion that the U.S. Constitution requires a count of every single person living in the United States, regardless of citizenship status, of age, of anything. If they’re in the United States, it must be counted for Census purposes,” said Senior Director of Voting and Representation at Common Cause, Dan Vicuña.
Under the first Trump Administration, the President also sought to exclude non-U.S. citizens from being counted in the census for Congressional apportionment, but the Supreme Court blocked that from happening.
“One of the issues that came up in the last legal tussles over the census citizenship question is, was this being used to suppress response to the Census?” said Senior Research Associate at the Urban Institute, Steve Martin.
