There is a clear asymmetry in the Trump administration’s mass-deportation efforts. As I’ve noted before, rounding up immigrants takes an enormous amount of manpower. Red states are more than happy to lend local law enforcement to the cause.
But blue states and cities? Not so much.
That divide may carry political ramifications. Currently, Texas and Florida are on pace to gain a total of five House seats and Electoral College votes in the 2030 reapportionment, while New York and California are projected to lose a combined four. However, under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, all residents of a state are counted in the census—citizens, legal residents, and undocumented immigrants alike—which is what reapportionment is based on.
If red states are more willing to deport members of their populations, that could backfire on the Republican Party and cut into its reapportionment gains.
Recent data from the Deportation Data Project, reported by The Economist, lends some support to that idea. Despite high-profile raids in Los Angeles and Chicago, “[m]ost arrests are being made by field offices in Republican states,” The Economist wrote, looking at data from Jan. 21 until July 29 of this year.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers participate in a training exercise in Brunswick, Georgia, on Aug. 21.
Among the 10 field offices with the highest shares of overall deportations in that time period, seven were in states that President Donald Trump won in 2024. And one is in Washington, D.C., which does not have a voting member of the House. D.C. also can’t lose electoral votes due to its own population changes, since its number of votes is based on that of the lowest-population state (currently Wyoming).
Texas and Florida also have the second- and third-largest populations of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., according to the Pew Research Center’s latest estimates. That suggests those states have more to lose, census-wise, from helping to deport undocumented immigrants inside their borders.
Additionally, the figures cited by The Economist don’t account for undocumented immigrants leaving red states for friendlier ones. Anecdotal evidence suggests it’s happening, but the scale isn’t clear. That said, if it happens in large numbers, that could stem some of the population loss occurring in blue states. But again, there’s not enough information to go off of at the moment.
The 2030 census is already becoming a political battlefield. Trump has pushed for an early census that excludes undocumented immigrants, but there is no constitutional basis for it—and the odds of it happening before his presidency ends are slim. Still, that suggests control of the White House will determine how the 2030 count is carried out. If Democrats hold power, red states will probably sue to convince the Supreme Court to toss undocumented immigrants from the tally. If Republicans keep the presidency, they’ll try to make exclusion the default—even though the Constitution clearly states that representatives must be apportioned by “the whole number of persons in each State.”
With Pew estimating around 14 million undocumented immigrants nationwide, a large-scale shift in where they live could alter congressional apportionment. And it would be poetic justice if Republican bigotry costs them power in the end.
