(Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday said he has told the Commerce Department to create a new Census that excludes undocumented migrants, revisiting a push from his first term that was later rejected by the courts and reversed by his successor.
Trump announced his fresh attack on the Census in an early-morning post on Truth Social, saying the population count should be “based on modern day facts and figures” and results of the 2024 presidential election.
“People who are in our Country illegally will not be counted in the census,” he said.
Trump has long railed against the inclusion of undocumented migrants in the Census, which is used to determine congressional apportionment, and signed a similar memorandum in the final year of his first term in office.
That measure was later challenged legally, with courts ruling that only Congress holds authority to define who is counted. Former President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s exclusion policy with an executive order upon taking office in 2021.
The latest push comes amid a nationwide campaign by the Trump administration to arrest migrants who are in the country illegally and to deport millions of people, actions that have prompted dozens of lawsuits.
The initiative is hurting Trump’s approval rating, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found. It showed that the heavy-handed tactics used – including workplace raids often by masked government agents – had taken Trump’s public approval rating on immigration to 41%, the lowest since his return to office.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal, Doina Chiacu and Brendan O’Brien; editing by Doina Chiacu and Susan Fenton)
