Missouri Attorney General Catherine L. Hanaway (R) announced Friday that “United States citizens have a right to representation, NOT illegal aliens. United States citizens should decide electoral votes and congressional seats, NOT illegal aliens. We are suing @uscensusbureau for unconstitutionally allowing illegal aliens to commandeer the path to The White House and compromise our elections.”
Hanaway added: “Foreign trespassers should not control the direction of this nation,” asserting that they are “cheating our system.” The Attorney General is demanding a Census recount and “that the Court prohibit the inclusion of illegal aliens in the Census.”
United States citizens have a right to representation, NOT illegal aliens. United States citizens should decide electoral votes and congressional seats, NOT illegal aliens.
We are suing @uscensusbureau for unconstitutionally allowing illegal aliens to commandeer the path to The… pic.twitter.com/UzU4UIF74V
— Attorney General Catherine L. Hanaway (@AGCHanaway) January 30, 2026
In addition to requesting a redo of the 2020 Census, the Attorney General’s complaint — which was filed Friday against the Department of Commerce and the Census Bureau — requests that the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri declare that including illegal aliens and temporary visa holders in the 2020 Census violated Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, and asks the court to prohibit the Census Bureau from including them in the 2030 Census tabulation.
[NOTE: Census counts, done once a decade, determine congressional representation from each state and have been a source of controversy recently as numerous states — notably Texas and California — have redrawn districts along political lines without waiting for new census population data.]
Hanaway contends that “including illegal aliens in the 2020 and 2030 Census enumerations has harmed and will harm Missourians by depriving them of their fair share of their own tax dollars.”
Note: According to Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants paid nearly $100 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue in 2022 while many are shut out of the programs their taxes fund. The findings run counter to anti-immigrant rhetoric that undocumented immigrants are “destroying” social programs.” The organization’s study revealed: “In 40 states, undocumented immigrants paid higher tax rates than the top 1% of the income scale in those states.”
During the first Trump administration, the president tried to exclude undocumented immigrants from participating in the federal census by trying to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census form itself. The Supreme Court blocked his attempt in 2019, ruling the administration’s stated reasoning was “contrived.” Democratic-led states including California and New York also sued against the President’s action. President Biden rescinded Trump’s executive memorandum on his first day in office in January 2021.