Why El Paso is already preparing for the 2030 census

"We're in 2026. If you start in 2029, you're too late."

That's Alejandra Chavez, mayor pro tem of El Paso, Texas, on a National League of Cities podcast published August 17, making the case that the 2030 census is a four-year project cities need to start on now. Chavez was in Washington for a congressional briefing on the 2020 undercount of young children.

El Paso's own numbers make the argument better than any warning could. The county is, statistically, close to a worst-case profile for getting missed.

Two hard-to-count groups, stacked in one county

The 2020 census didn't miss people evenly. The Census Bureau's own review found children under 5 were undercounted by 5.46 percent, roughly a million kids, the worst rate for that age group since the government started measuring it in 1950. Hispanic residents were undercounted by 4.99 percent. Those are the two largest undercounts in the country outside of American Indians on reservations, and we covered the full breakdown in how the census could be improved before 2030.

Now look at El Paso County. It has more of both groups than almost anywhere.

The county's 870,779 residents include 57,585 children under 5. That's a larger share of the population than the country carries as a whole, in a county that's more than four times as Hispanic as the nation. Apply the national under-5 undercount rate to those 57,585 children and you're looking at roughly 3,100 kids going uncounted, which is a rough illustration rather than a measurement, but it's the right order of magnitude for a single county.

Undercounts like that don't correct themselves for ten years. As Chavez put it: "When children are undercounted, that doesn't mean that they go away. It just means that they are less visible. And what they need in the future doesn't go away."

Why counting kids is so hard

Young children get missed for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone hiding. They're born between counts. They live in complicated households, with grandparents, with relatives, split between two homes, and whoever fills out the form often doesn't think to list a baby. The Bureau has documented that renters, large households, and multigenerational households all miss young kids at higher rates, and El Paso has plenty of all three.

Mixed-status households add another layer. Nearly a quarter of El Paso County residents were born outside the United States, and in a household where immigration status varies from person to person, a government form asking who lives here is not a neutral request. Chavez's argument is that the fix has to be built early: "Trust, I think, is just as important as access when it comes to filling out the census. So, we need to start building that trust today so that when we do get to 2030, we have all the tools necessary."

That job is getting harder, not easier. A draft federal rule now circulating would exclude undocumented immigrants from the apportionment count and likely restore a citizenship question, which we wrote about in the draft rule on the 2030 census. Census employees have said publicly that a citizenship question makes people afraid to answer at all, whether or not any enforcement follows. Cities like El Paso would absorb that damage directly.

What a missed child costs

Census figures steer roughly $2.8 trillion in federal spending a year across hundreds of programs, and many of the biggest ones, from Medicaid and CHIP to Head Start and school nutrition, are aimed at exactly the children most likely to be missed. A child left out in 2030 is left out of those formulas until 2040. We ran the funding math in the census misses a million young children.

Chavez's practical advice to other cities is to spend the next few years finding the neighborhoods that got undercounted last time and the local organizations residents already trust, well before any census worker knocks. El Paso is starting that work with four years to go. Most places haven't started at all.

Sources

Quotes and the podcast details are from the National League of Cities CitiesSpeak announcement, published August 17, 2026. Undercount rates for children under 5 and Hispanic residents are from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey and Demographic Analysis. El Paso County and national demographic figures are CensusEasy calculations from the American Community Survey 5-year estimates. The federal funding figure comes from Census Bureau estimates of programs guided by census data.