Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway is suing the U.S. Census Bureau and Department of Commerce for including people in the 2020 census who were in the United States without legal status.
According to the lawsuit announced Friday, Hanaway’s office wants the 2020 census to be changed to exclude those without legal status and temporary visa holders. The same rules would apply to the 2030 census.
“United States citizens and lawful permanent residents have a right to representation, unlike illegal aliens and temporary visa holders,” Hanaway’s office wrote in a press release. “In America, the People, the members of the social compact, are the only legitimate source of the government’s power. We are taking a stand against those who are cheating our system.”
The lawsuit claims Missouri would gain another congressional seat and Electoral College vote in 2030 if the change were made. It argues the state would receive a larger share of tax dollars.
“Attorney General Hanaway will not allow open-border states like California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Maryland to steal an estimated 11 congressional seats, 11 electoral votes, and billions of dollars in funding,” according to the release.
The legal argument
Missouri’s solicitor general, Louis Capozzi, said precedent backs his office’s lawsuit, citing a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court case, Franklin v. Massachusetts, concerning how the census should count people overseas.
“Our position is that illegal aliens and temporary foreign visitors are not and cannot be deemed domiciled in the United States,” Capozzi said in an interview Friday. “Citizens and lawful permanent residents are domiciled, and they can be counted.”
Similar arguments have been made in President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship case, which the U.S. Supreme Court will hear this year, said Travis Crum, a Washington University law professor.
Crum said the census has included people without legal status in the census counts for decades, because the Constitution requires the “whole number of persons in each state” be counted and does not explicitly limit the count to citizens.
“There's just this long-standing course of practice that this is legal, and presidents of both parties have run these censuses, and they've not been successfully challenged,” Crum said.
In 2020, Alabama dropped its 2018 lawsuit designed to exclude the same groups from the census. That same year, the Supreme Court avoided a direct decision on the issue by saying federal courts could not rule on Trump’s plan to exclude people without status from the census.
In 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to include only U.S. citizens in the census that then died in the Senate. It was reintroduced in 2025 but did not pass the House.
“We've seen this fight before, and so this is probably the first volley in a fight for the 2030 census to exclude undocumented immigrants,” Crum said.
With the three-judge federal district court panel requested in Hanaway’s lawsuit, there would be an automatic right of appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The reaction to Missouri’s lawsuit will likely be mixed, Crum added, because states such as Texas may lose seats if changes were to be made.
“You might see some interesting bedfellows here, in terms of, some of the typical states that would side with Missouri here might just stay silent,” Crum said.
The U.S. Department of Commerce and Census Bureau could not immediately be reached for comment Friday.
Population concerns
St. Louis University professor and demographer Ness Sandoval said the state should be more concerned with its population loss.
“Missouri needs to keep what it has,” Sandoval said. “It needs more people to be counted, all people to be counted. And if it wants to have a narrow count, it'll be up sooner to lose a seat than it will ever be to gain a seat back.”
Sandoval also said the 2020 census did not include questions about immigration status, making it nearly impossible to redo the census without polling again – which would be challenging and a burden to taxpayers.
“There are hundreds of thousands of people who are dead today that were alive when the census was done. You have babies who are born today that were not born in the 2020 census,” Sandoval said. “I don't know how you go back and do this when the census right now is preparing for 2030.”
