Even before taking office, former President Donald Trump’s administration obsessed over the U.S. census.

From a failed bid for a citizenship question to a presidential memo about unauthorized immigrants that was fast-tracked to the Supreme Court, its moves over the past four years followed a playbook first drawn up more than four decades ago by the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

In 1979, the hard-line group that became the most influential advocate for extreme restrictions on immigration launched a campaign that has held onto one consistent goal — obtaining an official count of unauthorized immigrants through the census to radically reshape Congress, the Electoral College and public policy.

Starting with a lawsuit filed weeks before the official start of the 1980 census, FAIR documented its strategy in a paper trail that NPR has reviewed in the organization’s archives at the George Washington University, as well as those of FAIR’s founder at the University of Michigan.

“It’s always been on the agenda,” Dan Stein, FAIR’s president, tells NPR, noting that it’s “very possible” that, as early as November 2016, the group discussed with Trump officials the possibility of excluding unauthorized immigrants from a key set of 2020 census results.

To some, it may seem curious that part of Trump’s agenda zeroed in on an often overlooked government tally of every person living in the U.S.

But census numbers hold what Trump has always wanted — power.

That power comes in the form of 435 votes in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. Once a decade, those votes are up for grabs among the states based on new census numbers. The more residents included in a state’s population count, the more of a say it has for the next 10 years in how federal laws are made and how the next occupant of the White House is chosen.

The Constitution has spelled out specific instructions for the census. Not just citizens or voters, but “persons” who reside in the states are supposed to be counted. Congress eventually codified the 14th Amendment’s language into federal law that calls for the “whole number of persons” living in each state and the “tabulation of total population” to be used when reapportioning House seats and electoral votes.

Census counting does have a thorny history. Before the Civil War, the fifth sentence of the country’s founding document required an enslaved person to be counted as “three fifths” of a free person. And it was just before the 1940 census that the Census Bureau determined the phrase “excluding Indians not taxed” could no longer omit some American Indians from the apportionment counts.

But since the first U.S. head count in 1790, this has been an unwavering truth: No resident has ever been left out because of immigration status.

Trump officials attempted to break with that 230-year precedent. The administration, like FAIR, wanted to subtract unauthorized immigrants from the apportionment counts, taking power away from those residents and the communities where they live.

One of President Biden’s first executive orders officially quashed the Trump memo that called for that extraordinary change.

But during the Trump years, FAIR came closer to getting that count of unauthorized immigrants than it has ever before.

A page out of an old playbook

The start of the Trump administration’s four-year census saga centered around a hotly contested question: Is this person a citizen of the United States?

Trump officials wanted to use the census to directly ask for the citizenship status of every person living in every household in the country for the first time in U.S. history. That proposal has long been considered anathema to best practices for a complete and accurate head count, and the administration was not up front about exactly why it wanted to add the question to the 2020 census.

Many opponents of that citizenship question argued it was originally intended to depress census participation. Under federal law, no government agency or court can use personal information collected by the Census Bureau against anyone. But a long history of distrust of the census has made many noncitizens, Latinos, Asian Americans, and other historically undercounted groups wary of telling the government their household’s citizenship status.

Some of the question’s critics also pointed to a scheme concocted by a GOP redistricting mastermind, Thomas Hofeller, to use the neighborhood block-level citizenship data the question would generate to politically benefit Republicans and “Non-Hispanic Whites” in state and local elections for years to come.

To Roger Conner, who led FAIR until 1988 as the group’s first executive director, it was clear that the Trump administration had another goal in mind — to change how congressional seats and electoral votes are reapportioned in order to curtail the political representation of areas where unauthorized immigrants live.

“I was saying to myself, ‘This is perfectly obvious. Why can’t someone figure out what’s going on?’ ” Conner says, recalling the Trump administration’s push for a citizenship question. “I assume that’s because they thought it was not in their interest to let everybody know what their strategy was.”

That strategy (which the administration never directly connected to apportionment until Trump’s memo was released years later) began percolating through Trump’s world even before he took office.

During the 2016 campaign, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach — an immigration hard-liner who has worked as a counsel to FAIR’s legal arm and was described by FAIR’s president as an “invaluable asset” to Trump’s immigration team — discussed a census citizenship question with campaign officials.

Shortly after the inauguration in 2017, Kobach talked about the question with Trump, then-chief strategist Steve Bannon and then-chief of staff Reince Priebus, according to Kobach’s testimony to congressional investigators.

Kobach later urged Wilbur Ross, the Trump-appointed commerce secretary overseeing the bureau, to add a specially-worded citizenship question to the census. It should also ask about immigration status, Kobach suggested in an email, so that the responses could address “the problem that aliens who do not actually ‘reside’ in the United States are still counted for congressional apportionment purposes.”

Other internal emails released for the lawsuits over the question show that the reapportionment of congressional seats was top of mind for Ross shortly after taking over the Commerce Department. In a March 2017 message from fellow Trump appointee Earl Comstock with the subject line “Your Question on the Census,” Ross received a link to a Census Bureau webpage that answered: “Are undocumented residents (aliens) in the 50 states included in the apportionment population counts?”

“Yes,” the bureau’s official response said.

But when Ross officially announced a citizenship question in 2018 as a late addition to the 2020 census form, it didn’t come with Kobach’s apportionment reasoning or checkboxes about immigration status. Instead, Ross used the Voting Rights Act to publicly justify the question, claiming the responses would help the Justice Department better enforce the civil rights era-law and protect “minority population voting rights.”

More than a year later, the Supreme Court rejected that justification for appearing to be “contrived” and blocked the question from appearing on the 2020 census.

By that point, career civil servants at the Census Bureau had repeatedly warned Trump officials that adding the question would not only likely lower response rates in some areas, but also produce citizenship data less accurate and more expensive than what could be generated from government records.

After threatening to delay the census in the wake of his Supreme Court loss, Trump issued an executive order in July 2019 that directed other federal agencies to share their citizenship records with the Census Bureau, which was already under orders from Ross to use records to produce anonymized, block-level data about the U.S. citizenship status of every adult living in the U.S. that states could use for redistricting.

Buried within Trump’s order about citizenship data was a new policy of developing “complete and accurate” data on “illegal aliens in the country” that did not attract much attention at the time. Existing estimates by the Department of Homeland Security and academic researchers, the order said, are not reliable enough to “evaluate” policy proposals about enforcing immigration laws and changing eligibility rules for public benefits.

“Data tabulating both the overall population and the citizen population could be combined with records of aliens lawfully present in the country to generate an estimate of the aggregate number of aliens unlawfully present in each State,” said Trump’s order, which Biden reversed last month.

At the White House Rose Garden announcement for Trump’s directive, the then-head of the Justice Department, William Barr, made no direct mention of how the DOJ could use the data to enforce the Voting Rights Act. Instead, Barr made sure to highlight how the data “may be relevant” to a lawsuit filed in 2018 by the state of Alabama “over whether illegal aliens can be included for apportionment purposes.”

At the 2019 White House Rose Garden announcement of an executive order for citizenship data, then-President Donald Trump was joined by then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (left) and then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr (right), who said the data “may be relevant” to a lawsuit “over whether illegal aliens can be included for apportionment purposes.”
Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
FAIR’s underground beginnings

These signals from the Trump administration echoed arguments FAIR first made more than 40 years ago.

Toward the end of the 1970s, FAIR was a fledgling advocacy group desperate to emerge from a windowless basement office in Washington, D.C., as a national voice.

The U.S. was more than a decade into major demographic shifts: A greater and greater share of people living inside the U.S. were born elsewhere, and a predominantly white population was becoming less so.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 had ended an earlier quota system that favored people from Northern and Western Europe, while also imposing the first caps on the number of people allowed to enter from Mexico and other countries in the Western Hemisphere. The landmark law, along with the end of a legal program for temporary farmworkers from Mexico, helped usher in a rise in immigration, both legal and illegal, from Latin America, Asia and other parts of the world.

That led John Tanton — an eye doctor from a mostly white resort town along Lake Michigan who held a particular interest in population control as a form of environmentalism — to start FAIR.

The group’s calls for an end to illegal immigration and fewer legal pathways for newcomers were not met with fanfare.

“We were obviously very small fish in a very big pond, and so got little attention,” Tanton later recalled in an oral history interview that touched on FAIR’s early days working underground with less than a handful of staffers.

To try to make a splash, FAIR went to court in December 1979.

Its federal lawsuit against former President Jimmy Carter’s administration called for a citizenship question to be included on both the long and short versions of the 1980 census form. The responses, FAIR argued, would generate a count of noncitizens that could eventually produce a state-by-state tally of unauthorized immigrants by matching noncitizens with green cards to government records.

Concerned about persistent undercounts, some census advocates at the time focused their energy on encouraging unauthorized immigrants to participate in the count.

Conner, FAIR’s first executive director, recalls reading a 1979 newspaper article about that effort and says FAIR sued partly out of concern that including unauthorized immigrants in the apportionment counts would increase the political power of “institutions that would favor the perpetuation, the expansion of immigration.”

Stein acknowledges the stakes of bringing this issue before the highest court in the land. If the justices declared that reapportioning House seats and electoral votes without unauthorized immigrants is unconstitutional, FAIR would have to resort to advocating for a constitutional amendment, which Stein calls a “very heavy lift.”

But the Trump administration left office with no definitive Supreme Court ruling on its plan to alter counts that, according to the Constitution, must include the “whole number of persons in each state.”

That leaves the door open for Alabama’s lawsuit and any future legal challenges to test their limits in the courts. And as planning ramps up for the 2030 census, it leaves behind a lingering question: How much further could FAIR’s campaign go if another president in line with its ambitions enters the White House?