Hansi Lo Wang for NPR:
Among the dozens of Biden-era executive orders that President Trump revoked on Monday was one that had reversed the first Trump administration’s unprecedented policy of altering a key set of census results.
Since the first U.S. census in 1790, no resident has ever been omitted from those numbers because of immigration status. And after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment has called for the population counts that determine each state’s share of U.S. House seats and Electoral College votes to include the “whole number of persons in each state.”
Biden’s now-revoked 2021 order affirmed the longstanding practice of including the total number of persons residing in each state in those census results. It was issued in response to Trump’s attempt during the national tally in 2020 to exclude millions of U.S. residents without legal status.