Immigrant advocates expressed concern Friday over the Trump administration’s announcement that it will include a citizenship question in a pilot test of the 2030 census, to be conducted between April and September in approximately 155,000 households in Huntsville, Alabama, and Spartanburg, South Carolina.
The Republican administration revealed Thursday its intention to incorporate the controversial question into the test, reviving an initiative that seeks to count the U.S. population based on immigration status.
The measure reignites a debate that already faced legal obstacles during Trump’s first term, when courts blocked the inclusion of such a question in the 2020 census following multiple lawsuits.
“Let there be no doubt: adding a citizenship question is a calculated attempt to suppress Latino participation and erase other communities of color from the American map,” warned the organization Voto Latino in a statement, calling the proposal “a direct attack” aimed at depriving states with immigrant populations of resources. The organization also maintained that the measure violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which requires counting every person residing in the United States regardless of immigration status.
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Last year, Trump proposed conducting a special census in 2026 that would exclude undocumented immigrants, amid efforts to redraw electoral districts to favor Republicans in Congress. The president abandoned the initiative after experts deemed it “unconstitutional,” given that the Constitution stipulates that the decennial census—the next one is due in 2030—must count “the whole number of persons in each state,” the basis for the distribution of federal resources and legislative representation.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who oversees the Census Bureau, is expected to support efforts to include the question on the final 2030 census forms. Meanwhile, Voto Latino warns that more than 68 million Latinos reside in the United States—nearly one in five people—but a third of Latino households face a high risk of being left out of the census due to fears that their personal information will be shared with immigration agencies like ICE.