Latino Population Growth Fell by Nearly 1 Million in the Latest Census Estimates

American population growth has slowed sharply, and one group accounts for most of the slowdown. New estimates from the Census Bureau show the United States added about 1.8 million people between July 2024 and July 2025, down from 3.2 million the year before. That is roughly 1.5 million fewer people added in a single year. Latinos, with about 1 million fewer added than the previous year, account for nearly two-thirds of the entire drop.

The figures come from an analysis of the Census Bureau's latest population estimates by Rogelio Sáenz, a professor of sociology and demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio, published in The Latino Newsletter.

The Latino growth rate of 1.96 percent is just over half the prior year's 3.45 percent, and the lowest in five years. The only recent year that was lower was 2020 to 2021, the first year of the pandemic, when it fell to 1.23 percent. Every other racial and ethnic group also saw its growth rate fall, including a substantial drop among Asian Americans, but none as steeply as Latinos.

It is migration, not births

A population changes for three reasons: births, deaths, and net international migration. What makes these numbers unusual is that only one of the three moved. Latino births and deaths stayed essentially flat across the two years. The entire swing came from migration.

Latino net international migration fell from roughly 1.2 million to 543,000, a decline of about 625,000 people, or 54 percent. As recently as 2023 to 2024, immigration accounted for 60 percent of all Latino population growth. In the latest year it accounted for 40 percent.

The pattern holds across the whole country. Net international migration fell by about 1.5 million overall, and 81 percent of that decline was among non-white groups: Latinos made up 41 percent of the drop, and all other non-white groups combined made up another 40 percent.

What the analysis argues, and what the data can and cannot show

Sáenz reads the numbers as evidence of the effect of the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign, and argues Latinos have been disproportionately affected by it. "Who are these nearly 1 million Latinos who are not with us?" he writes, answering that they include babies who would have been born here to mothers who are no longer in the country, people who were deported or chose to leave, and people who under earlier conditions would have immigrated.

The Census data itself is not in dispute: population growth slowed, the slowdown runs through net international migration rather than birth rates, and it falls hardest on Latino and other non-white populations. The question of exactly why migration fell is where interpretation begins, and the deportation-campaign explanation is Sáenz's analysis rather than a Census Bureau finding.

Sáenz is careful about the limits himself. These estimates cover the period ending July 1, 2025, which captures less than six months of the deportation operation that began on January 20, 2025. The next round of estimates, covering July 2025 to July 2026 and due in June 2027, will be the first to show a full year of it.

The bigger demographic picture

Whatever the cause, the direction matters. Latino population growth has been one of the main engines of U.S. population growth for decades, and immigration has been a large part of that engine. A country where the Latino growth rate falls by nearly half in a single year, and where births are not making up the difference, is a country growing more slowly overall.

You can see where Latino and Hispanic populations are concentrated on the largest Hispanic population by state rankings and in our look at where the most Mexican Americans live, read the longer trend in which race is increasing the most, or compare any two places with the compare tool.

Sources

The analysis and figures are from Rogelio Sáenz, "Latino Population Growth Fell by Nearly 1 Million in Latest Census Estimates", The Latino Newsletter (July 14, 2026). The underlying data is the U.S. Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 population estimates, covering July 1, 2024 to July 1, 2025.