President Donald Trump on Thursday directed the Department of Commerce to begin work on what he called a “new and highly accurate” U.S. census that would exclude people living in the country without legal authorization. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said the count should draw on “modern day facts and figures” and information from the 2024 presidential election, adding that "people who are in our Country illegally will not be counted." The announcement revives a policy Trump pursued in 2020, when his administration sought both to add a citizenship question to the questionnaire and later to remove undocumented immigrants from the apportionment totals used to allocate seats in Congress and the Electoral College. Those moves were blocked by federal courts and rescinded by President Joe Biden in 2021, after judges ruled that only Congress can redefine who is counted in the constitutionally mandated decennial enumeration. Excluding undocumented residents—estimated by the Department of Homeland Security at about 11 million—could shift political power and federal funding away from immigrant-heavy states such as California, Florida and Texas. Legal challenges are expected, and the directive lands as Republican-led states weigh mid-decade redistricting ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The next regularly scheduled census is in 2030, but planning for that count is already under way at the Census Bureau.