uring the first Trump administration its opponents battled it all the way to the Supreme Court over a seemingly mundane initiative: The president’s effort to reinstate a simple citizenship question on the 2020 census. In a little-noticed move, the second Trump administration may have just re-ignited that battle — one that could presage a much broader war over citizenship, the 2030 census, and whether illegal aliens will continue to distort political maps to be drawn after that count takes place.
On Feb. 3, the Census Bureau issued a regulatory notice indicating its plan to administer a survey that includes the query “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” as part of a major “operational test in support” of the next decennial census in 2030. The inclusion of that question in the 2026 field test, the first of two before the 2030 census, suggests the administration may intend to reinstate a question asked of respondents without issue for well over a century prior to 1960, and that some 3.5 million people continue to respond to annually via the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). The ACS, which also asks about place of birth and year of entry, is the survey the bureau plans to administer for its 2026 test, according to the regulatory notice.
There are myriad straightforward reasons for posing such a question when collecting nationwide data, beyond the obvious point that knowing who is living in America is among the most basic pieces of information Americans and our leaders should possess.
The first Trump administration laid out its rationale in a 2019 executive order that the Biden administration would later rescind. It argued that the more complete and accurate citizenship data would aid in:
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