President Donald Trump just requested that the Commerce Department take steps to end the fighting over the gerrymandering we are seeing in red and blue states.
Former President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s prior call to eliminate illegal immigrants from the census after he took office.
Now, Trump is trying to undo that move, which will have the left up in arms.
The purpose of a census is to count residents who are living in specific geographical areas of the country in order to allocate political representation, government funding, and the like.
For our purposes, the two main areas of concern over what Trump says are inflated statistics are government representation and government funding.
Political representation stands to be greatly impacted by census rules, as states with a heavy illegal immigration population, if such individuals are counted in the census, could end up with more congressional seats, while red states that are following our immigration laws would be penalized with fewer representatives (in the past, all residents, not just legal residents and citizens have been included in the census).
Federal funding is also a big deal, as social programs, healthcare, and infrastructure funding, among other programs, are all decided upon based on census numbers.
After Biden took office, he immediately reversed Trump’s change in how the census was to be conducted (Trump broke tradition when he was in office by trying to eliminate illegal immigrants from the census).
When Biden issued the order, he stated that this would “ensure that the Census Bureau has time to complete an accurate population count for each state” in search of apportionment that is “fair and accurate so federal resources are efficiently and fairly distributed for the next decade.”
This jammed up many state legislatures, as the timeline to redraw maps had been pushed back to accommodate the updated numbers.
State officials nationwide complained about the delay, but Democrats were more than happy to push back their plans if it meant they would be able to flip congressional maps in their favor due to the updated numbers by the Census Bureau.
Concerned about the integrity of state representation, Trump has asked the Department of Commerce to redo the census, concentrating only on counting American citizens and legal residents.
Trump stated, "I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024.”
This is a very strategic move by Trump to justify redistricting based on census numbers that would not include illegal immigrants. Redoing the census would also prompt a reallocation of the other programs impacted by census numbers.
Now, all these new maps are going to get challenged by the other side in court, with many of them going to either state supreme courts or to the Supreme Court of the United States. This will arguably be the biggest test gerrymandering laws have ever faced in this country.
