Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Biden rescinds Trump order excluding the undocumented from reapportionment numbers

Joe Biden signs executive orders

President Biden signs executive orders just hours after taking the oath of office Wednesday.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

During his first day in office, President Biden signed a flurry of executive orders countermanding the actions of his predecessor. That initial batch of 17 orders included a reversal of Donald Trump's unprecedented effort to exclude undocumented immigrants when tabulating the U.S. population for the purpose of reallocating congressional districts.

Citing the 14th Amendment, Biden restored the centuries-old practice of counting every person residing in the United States when determining how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives.

"We have long guaranteed all of the Nation's inhabitants representation in the House of Representatives," the order reads. "This tradition is foundational to our representative democracy, for our elected representatives have a responsibility to represent the interests of all people residing in the United States and affected by our laws. This tradition also respects the dignity and humanity of every person."


While advocates for the traditional, inclusive count celebrated Biden's executive order, it is more important as a symbol for the new administration's priorities than as an actual directive. Steven Dillingham, the Census Bureau director under Trump, resigned Wednesday — nearly a year ahead of schedule — after coming under heavy criticism for politicizing the decennial count, and the agency had already abandoned plans to eliminate illegal immigrants from the enumeration.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

According to data assembled by the Center for Immigration Studies, three states — California, New York and Texas — would each lose a seat in the House of Representatives if illegal immigrants were excluded from the numbers used for reapportionment. Those seats would go to Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio — probably leading to small net gain of congressional seats for Republicans.

If U.S.-born children of that cohort were included, California and Texas would each lose two seats and New York would still drop one. The two additional districts would go to Michigan and West Virginia.

Trump's July 2019 order had directed federal agencies to share citizenship data with the Census Bureau and was based on research by a Republican strategist who determined that adding a citizenship question to the census would help the GOP's gerrymandering efforts.

In addition to allocating congressional seats, the numbers are used to determine how federal dollars are appropriated among the states.

Read More

The Power of Outrage and Keeping Everyone Guessing

Question marks on a stack of small blocks.

Getty Images / Sakchai Vongsasiripat

The Power of Outrage and Keeping Everyone Guessing

Donald Trump loves to keep us guessing. This is exactly what we’re all doing as his second term in the White House begins. It’s one way he controls the narrative.

Trump’s off the cuff, unfiltered, controversial statements infuriate opponents and delight his supporters. The rest of us are left trying to figure out the difference between the shenanigans and when he’s actually serious.

Keep ReadingShow less
To help heal divides, we must cut “the media” some slack

Newspaper headline cuttings.

Getty Images / Sean Gladwell

To help heal divides, we must cut “the media” some slack

A few days ago, Donald Trump was inaugurated. In his second term, just as in his first, he’ll likely spark passionate disagreements about news media: what is “fake news” and what isn’t, which media sources should be trusted and which should be doubted.

We know we have a media distrust problem. Recently it hit an all-time low: the percentage of Americans with "not very much" trust in the media has risen from 27% in 2020 to 33% in 2024.

Keep ReadingShow less
Meet the Faces of Democracy: Tommy Gong

Tommy Gong is the deputy county clerk-recorder for Contra Costa County, San Francisco Bay Area—home to over 700,000 registered voters.

Photo Courtesy of Issue One

Meet the Faces of Democracy: Tommy Gong

Californian Tommy Gong is the deputy county clerk-recorder for Contra Costa County which is located in the San Francisco Bay Area and home to over 700,000 registered voters. He has been an election administrator for over two decades, having served in other California counties including San Luis Obispo and Stanislaus.

Gong, who is not affiliated with any political party, has received wide recognition throughout his tenure as an election official. He led efforts to coordinate communication tactics to increase public trust in election processes across the Bay Area by forming the Coalition of Bay Area Election Officials. This initiative received awards from the National Association of Election Officials and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Keep ReadingShow less