Menin and James join forces against Trump's 2030 census plan

New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin and New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a joint effort on October 1 to fight the Trump administration's proposed changes to the 2030 census, which would leave some immigrants out of the counts used to divide House seats and drop questions on race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.

Both plan to file public comments opposing the proposal and are urging New Yorkers to do the same, the New York City Council said in a press release. They also asked the administration to extend the comment period, which runs through October 13. The Riverdale Press also reported the announcement.

The proposal, released in September, would exclude noncitizens who are not permanent residents from the apportionment count. Menin and James argue that conflicts with the Constitution's requirement to count the "whole number of persons" in each state.

"The administration's proposal to exclude non-citizens and non-permanent residents from the Census is unconstitutional and threatens to deny communities the representation and resources they're entitled to," Menin said. She and James fought the first Trump administration's attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, a case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

"My office fought this same issue in 2019, and won at every level, all the way up to the Supreme Court," James said. "If this administration wants to go for round two, we are prepared to win again."

A task force already at work

The effort builds on the Council's Census Taskforce, which Menin launched in August to prepare for the 2030 count. Its co-chairs are Menin, L. Joy Williams of the NAACP New York State Conference, Emely Paez of United Way of New York City, and Jeffrey M. Wice of New York Law School's New York Elections, Census, and Redistricting Institute. The city also created an Office of the Census last November. Menin directed the city's 2020 census effort.

Williams said dropping the race questions "will take away one of our strongest tools to enforce what's left of the Voting Rights Act, combat systemic discrimination, and identify racial disparities." Wice said the city's 2020 effort "helped count over 620,000 more New Yorkers and reversed the trend of lost congressional representation that started after the 1940 census."

Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, said the proposal would exclude nearly 2 million New Yorkers who lack green cards or citizenship. The Census Bureau does not publish that exact group. Its American Community Survey counts 1,832,210 noncitizens in New York state, or 9.2 percent of residents, a total that also includes green-card holders who would still be counted. In New York City, the survey counts 1,279,615 noncitizens, 15.1 percent of the city's population.

Congress, not the president, has final authority over the census. What the proposal would do nationally is covered in our report on the 2030 census proposal, and what it could mean for the state's House seats in what the proposed changes could mean for New York. The case against dropping census questions is laid out in seven reasons dropping census questions would leave the US data-blind.

Sources

The announcement, quotes, and comment deadline are from the New York City Council's press release "Speaker Julie Menin, Attorney General Letitia James, and NYC Council Census Taskforce Fight Back Against Trump Administration's Unconstitutional Attacks on 2030 Census" (October 1, 2026), as first reported by The Riverdale Press. Noncitizen counts are from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020-2024 American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B05001.