Sponsors
The bill creates faster, more detailed citizenship-based census data and shifts apportionment to better reflect the voting-eligible population—helping state planning and researchers—but raises substantial privacy and participation risks for noncitizens, could redistribute representation and funding away from immigrant-rich communities, and invites administrative and legal challenges.
State governments (and taxpayers) will receive detailed state-level counts by citizenship/immigration status within 120 days after each census, improving state planning, allocation decisions, and public transparency about demographic composition.
Researchers, nonprofits, and service providers can use disaggregated citizenship/immigration data to better target programs, improve outreach to immigrant communities, and design services more effectively.
Residents in states with higher citizen populations will see increased representation—more House seats and Electoral College votes—because apportionment will be based on citizens, aligning representation more closely with the voting-eligible population.
Noncitizen and undocumented individuals may face increased privacy and safety risks from publication of citizenship/immigration counts, deterring participation in the census and cooperation with other government programs.
Lower response rates among noncitizens could reduce overall census accuracy and lead to misallocation of federal funds and altered apportionment outcomes, creating redistribution risks for states, localities, and taxpayers.
States with large noncitizen populations could lose Representatives and Electoral College votes starting with the 2030 census, reducing political influence for those states and the communities within them.
Based on analysis of 5 sections of legislative text.
Introduced January 21, 2026 by Tom Barrett · Last progress January 21, 2026
Requires the Census Bureau to add a citizenship-status question option to the 2030 decennial census and every decennial census thereafter, and to publish state-level counts by citizenship categories shortly after each census. It changes apportionment law so that noncitizens are excluded from the population base used to allocate House seats and Electoral College electors beginning with the 2030 apportionment, and adds a provision affecting congressional redistricting after the November 2024 election.