Free Republic

Following a years-long surge in illegal immigration, the Trump administration is poised to challenge a longstanding but legally fraught practice: counting illegal aliens in the U.S. census. President Trump tried to end the practice during his first term, but President Biden overturned his predecessor’s policy before it was implemented. Now, buoyed by red state attorneys general and Republican legislators, the second Trump administration is determined “to clean up the census and make sure that illegal aliens are not counted,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller said last month.

RCP's Phil Wegmann interviewed 'Border Czar' Tom Homan on Thursday's edition of the RealClearPolitics podcast about Iranians arrested by ICE this week, two million people who entered the U.S. without registering at all during the Biden administration, and what the "Big, Beautiful Bill" will do on immigration enforcement. "It's hard to find someone who doesn't want to be found, but it’s our number one focus," Homan said. "We didn't wait for the attack in Iran, but right now we put our foot on the gas with what happened in Iran." "We all know we had an open border for the...

Rep. Tom Tancredo – who vied for the Republican presidential nomination to make illegal immigration a priority issue – suggested in a House speech yesterday that Pope Benedict XVI is encouraging Latin Americans to come to the U.S. to bolster flagging membership in the Catholic Church.

This afternoon, a young woman claiming to be a Field Representative from the US Census Bureau knocked on our door and aske my wife if she could ask a few questions. The first was her birthday. My wife impulsively gave it to her and then thought better of it, and got quite agitated, asking why she thought she could just drop in and start asking questions. After all, we filled out our Census form in 2020, and the next one is in 2030, five years from now. The rep got a bit snippy, saying "once the interview had started it...

During his first term, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Census Bureau to add a question about citizenship status to the 2020 national survey. There was good reason for this. The Census is used to count the population. Population numbers are then used to determine how many congressional seats are allocated to each state. Given illegal aliens aren’t citizens and ineligible to vote, they should not have representation in Congress and Democrats shouldn’t benefit from additional congressional seats based on an illegal population. “If unauthorized immigrants were excluded from the apportionment count, California, Florida and Texas would...

USPS workers will also replace 20,000 Social Security workers. "We spend $40 billion every 10 years doing the census. And that means we hire 625,000 people. And they go, and they rent cars and gas, and you pay them food... They go to every household and count the people." "What department do we already have that already employs 625,000 people? It's got cars, already has gas, and goes to every household. [Answer: USPS]." "They can go to your house when you have a baby and give you the form for Social Security. And the 20,000 Social Security officers that we...

California Governor Gavin Newsom is once again proving his loyalty—not to the hardworking taxpayers of his state, but to the ever-growing population of illegal immigrants who have flooded California thanks to the Democrats and Biden administration’s disastrous open-border policies.During the first budget hearing of 2025 for the California Assembly, Newsom’s office admitted that they grossly underestimated the cost of providing free, taxpayer-funded healthcare to illegal aliens.Originally projected at $6.5 billion, the true cost has now skyrocketed to $9.5 billion—a staggering 46.2% increase from what was initially claimed.That’s nearly $10 billion of California taxpayers’ hard-earned money being funneled into services for...

Florida’s 2020 Census undercount is costing the state at least $2.3 billion annually in federal Medicaid funding, according to a new report published on Tuesday by Florida TaxWatch. The result is a projected loss of $2.3 billion in federal Medicaid contributions for fiscal year 2024-25 alone. “In 2020, Florida’s census undercount cost the state one, potentially two, congressional seats and resulted in a loss of federal funding that will range from $11 billion to $21 billion by the end of the decade,” said Florida TaxWatch President and CEO Dominic M. Calabro. Beyond Medicaid, the census undercount affects other federally funded...

The director of the U.S. Census Bureau, Robert Santos, announced Thursday he is resigning, giving President Trump an early opportunity to nominate a new political appointee to lead the agency.

The U.S. Census Bureau will now count refugees and border releases in its population estimates, a move that will affect congressional apportionment forecasts and demographic data. In a blog post Thursday announcing the change, the bureau noted, “a net of 2.8 million people migrated to the United States between 2023 and 2024. This is significantly higher than our previous estimates.”The data offers a glimpse of how congressional apportionment maps could change by 2030. It also shows how, as U.S. citizens flee states with garbage leftist policies, the inclusion of noncitizens in census data allows those states to keep congressional seats...

The new 2024 Census count for states was just released and it shows a giant surge in immigration. In 2022, adding humanitarian migrants (refugees and asylum-seekers) increased international net migration from 999,000 to 1,693,000, an increase of 69.5%. In 2023, the increase was from 1,135,000 to 2,290,000, or 101.7%. The 2024 figure of 2,786,000 included humanitarian migrants. What’s not known with any precision – and what angers voters – is how many of the new entrants were illegal immigrants. A recent Goldman Sachs estimate puts the number at around 60%. We do know that LEGAL immigrants are helping America avoid...

The US Census Bureau is adding refugees to its immigrant count by The Associated Press 12/16/2024 The U.S. Census Bureau is changing how it counts immigrants in annual estimates by including more people who were admitted for humanitarian, and often temporary, reasons. The change is being made in an effort to better reflect population shifts this decade, officials said Monday. Population estimates, including immigration, are due to be released Thursday showing how the populations of the United States and the 50 states changed this year. However, the new approach to counting immigrants will only be reflected nationally. The percentage of...

There is no doubt that President-elect Donald Trump has won a sweeping victory, becoming only the second U.S. president to be elected to a second, non-consecutive term in one of the most remarkable political comeback stories in American history. But his victory in the Electoral College would’ve been even bigger if two factors hadn’t cheated him out of the additional votes he should have received. Why do I say this? Because of the jarring errors the Census Bureau admitted it made in its population numbers for multiple states, and its unfair inclusion of aliens in the population used for congressional...

The influx of millions of migrants has shifted political power in the nation to Democrats, even though they are not allowed to vote... While they may be considered noncitizens, illegal and legal migrants are counted by the census, and those numbers are used to shift congressional districts, which affect electoral votes, according to two new studies from the Center for Immigration Studies.... “Immigration shifts political power in the United States — without a single immigrant having to vote. Seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and thus votes in the Electoral College are apportioned among the states based on each...

It’s November 2023, and, following the October 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists that killed some 1,400 Israelis and at least 31 Americans, thousands of demonstrators march through New York City, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” echo through the streets, along with “there is only one solution: intifada revolution.” Among the crowd is the infamous Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who warns through a megaphone that a cabal of wily Jews has conspired to place “their little posters” (of kidnapped Israeli civilians) across the city, seeking...

A controversial bill being pushed by lefty legislators in Albany is trying to make the Empire State less “white,” critics say. The legislation, sponsored by Assemblywoman Jessica González-Rojas (D-Queens) and Sen. Michael Gianaris (D-Queens), would mandate state agencies and other entities use separate categories for Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) New Yorkers when collecting demographics data – rather than relying on the US Census, which classifies them under one “white” umbrella. The state Senate on Thursday voted unanimously to pass it, but González-Rojas’ version of the bill is still facing pushback in the Assembly. Both pols argue “MENA” individuals...

The GOP-led House of Representatives is scheduled to vote for Wednesday on legislation that would add a U.S. citizenship question to the census.The census is conducted every 10 years.The Equal Representation Act, would require a "citizenship question on the decennial census" as well as "modify apportionment of Representatives to be based on United States citizens instead of all persons."According to the U.S. Census Bureau, "at the conclusion of each census, the results are used to calculate the number of House memberships to which each state is entitled," a process referred to as apportionment.The Trump administration explored adding a citizenship question...

Joe Biden at his State of the Union address in March boasted his administration has created 15 million new jobs since January 2021. Not exactly. When you delve into the math, not only is the number highly misleading, but it turns out that new jobs consist largely of part-time employment, nebulous self-employment, and government workers. And among native-born citizens, the job market is in a recession. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes two jobs reports: the “Establishment Survey” and the “Household Survey.” The Establishment Survey samples actual employers and shows the growth in non-farm payroll jobs (as well as a...

Jacked higher by President Joe Biden’s open-borders agenda, there are now more legal and illegal immigrants in America than at any other time in history. At 51.1 million, the number isn’t just the highest ever, but so is the share at 15.5%, according to Census Bureau numbers reviewed by the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates enforcing border laws. “Analysis of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey shows that the total foreign-born or immigrant population (legal and illegal) hit a new record high of 51.4 million in February 2024 — an increase of 6.4 million since President Biden took office....

Immigration into the U.S. has risen so rapidly that it beat out federal projections by decades, according to a report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released on Thursday. The total number of immigrants in the U.S. rose to a record high of 51.4 million as of February 2024, representing 15.5% of the total population,according to CIS. The U.S. Census Bureau published projections in November which estimated that the share of foreign-born nationals in the U.S. would not reach 15.5% until at least 2039, making the projections “obsolete,” CIS authors Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler wrote. (RELATED: Biden Considering...