California would be the biggest winner in the sanctuary vote scam, as it would gain 11 more congressional seats due to immigrants and their young children being counted in the census.
President Trump is once again pushing to exclude illegal aliens from the census count used to determine congressional representation and Electoral College votes.
On January 20, 2025, he rescinded a Biden-era executive order that had mandated counting all residents regardless of immigration status, signaling his intent to revisit the policy. The president argues that including undocumented immigrants dilutes the political power of U.S. citizens and amounts to a form of voter suppression.
Trump declared that “States adopting policies that encourage illegal aliens to enter this country and that hobble Federal efforts to enforce the immigration laws passed by Congress should not be rewarded with greater representation in the House of Representatives”.
Liberal states are already mobilizing resistance, as they did during Trump’s first term when challengers led by New York, along with cities, counties, and immigrant rights groups, argued that Trump’s move could leave several million people uncounted and cause California, Texas and New Jersey to lose House seats.
New York Attorney General Letitia James accused Trump of trying to “punish states that are immigrant-rich” and “transfer power from those states that have significant number of immigrants to those that do not”, with groups including the ACLU immediately filing lawsuits arguing the policy violates the Constitution and federal law.
The scale of sanctuary jurisdictions protecting illegal aliens is staggering. The Center for Immigration Studies identifies 13 sanctuary states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, and Washington, along with 220 sanctuary cities and counties across the United States.
California became the most populous sanctuary state after the passage of the California Values Act in October 2017, followed by Illinois which expanded its sanctuary law in 2021, banning alien detention centers and prohibiting local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE.
The major sanctuary cities include some of America’s largest urban centers. Los Angeles, the second-largest city in the U.S. with almost 4 million people, has refused to honor ICE detainers since July 2014. San Francisco, which proudly proclaims on its official website that “we are a sanctuary city, now, tomorrow and forever,” codified its status with policies that rule out immigration detainer compliance.
New York City’s sanctuary policies have led to egregious crimes, while Seattle, with 754,000 residents, has adhered to a policy of not asking about immigration status since 2003. Denver became an illegal alien sanctuary based on an April 2014 Sheriff Department memo stating that Denver no longer honors immigration detainers.
The impact on congressional representation is profound and measurable. California and Texas host the largest undocumented populations, with California having approximately 2.6 million and Texas having 1.6 million unauthorized immigrants according to Department of Homeland Security data. The next largest populations were in Florida (590,000), New Jersey (490,000), Illinois (420,000), and New York (410,000) unauthorized immigrants.
If unauthorized immigrants were excluded from the 2020 census apportionment count, California, Florida and Texas would each end up with one less congressional seat than they would have been awarded. California would lose two seats instead of one, Florida would gain one instead of two, and Texas would gain two instead of three. Excluding the broader group of all noncitizens would have resulted in California receiving three fewer seats, plus Texas and Florida with one fewer seat each, while Idaho, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia would have each received one additional seat.
The Electoral College implications are equally significant since each state’s electoral votes equal their total congressional delegation. California, Florida, and Texas would each lose a seat in the House, and Alabama, Minnesota, and Ohio would each keep a seat they would otherwise lose because of population shifts, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. The states would lose an equal number of Electoral College votes, which are based on the sizes of their House delegations.
The Center for Immigration Studies analysis shows that illegal immigrants and their U.S.-born minor children will redistribute five seats in 2020, with Ohio, Michigan, Alabama, Minnesota, and West Virginia each losing one seat that they otherwise would have had, while California and Texas will each have two additional seats, and New York will have one additional seat. California is the biggest winner, as it will gain 11 more congressional seats due to immigrants and their young children; New York and Texas will get four more seats each, while Florida will get three seats, New Jersey two seats, and Massachusetts and Illinois one seat each.
This represents a massive transfer of political power from states that enforce immigration law to sanctuary jurisdictions that actively shield illegal aliens. The census scam allows sanctuary states and cities to artificially inflate their political representation while law-abiding states lose congressional seats and electoral votes they rightfully deserve based on their citizen populations.
