Democratic officials across the country are moving aggressively to shield illegal migrants from federal enforcement in ways that could reshape the balance of political power after the 2030 Census.
According to the Daily Caller, liberal lawmakers and progressive activists are seizing on two controversial enforcement incidents that ended in deadly shootings to justify a sweeping expansion of sanctuary-style policies, even as population trends point to steep representation losses for deep-blue states in the next round of congressional apportionment.
By making it harder for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol to arrest and remove illegal migrants, these measures could help preserve or even expand the number of House seats held by Democratic strongholds that are otherwise bleeding residents to red states.
By hindering immigration enforcement with their sanctuary policies, theyre doing two things: Theyre forcing ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers into the community to make arrests of dangerous criminal aliens, but theyre also preventing ICE from making arrests of other individuals who are in the U.S. illegally, Art Arthur, a resident fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said to the DCNF.
The harder that those sanctuary states make it for ICE to do its job, the fewer people ICE is going to be able to remove, and the more people who will be present in 2030 to be counted for the decennial census, Arthur continued.
Democrats have strong political incentives to pursue this strategy. Under current migration and population trends, data analysts forecast that several Democratic bastions are on track to lose representation after the 2030 Census, while Republican-led states stand to gain.
California is poised to lose four congressional seats while New York is expected to lose two seats, as both of the deep blue states deal with stagnating populations, according to an analysis by the Redistricting Network. At the same time, the Republican strongholds of Texas and Florida are expected to gain four seats each.
The liberal strongholds of Rhode Island, Minnesota, Illinois and Oregon are all expected to lose one congressional seat each, according to the Redistricting Network. These projected losses reflect a broader pattern of Americans voting with their feet and leaving high-tax, high-regulation blue states for jurisdictions that emphasize lower taxes, public order and economic freedom.
The five states with the largest population declines from domestic migration were California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey and Massachusetts, according to the American Redistricting Project. The five states with largest population growth from domestic migration were Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida and Tennessee.
However, every state in the union experienced population growth due to international migration. Experts suggest blue states could utilize anti-ICE policies to bolster their standing ahead of the 2030 Census by ensuring that large numbers of illegal migrants remain in their jurisdictions long enough to be counted.
Will it make an impact? Potentially, Arthur said, noting his only hesitation is if the Trump administration takes steps that would largely force illegal migrants to leave, no matter the sanctuary haven. The long-time immigration expert strongly encouraged the White House to implement E-Verify on a national scale, requiring every employer in the U.S. to verify the employment status of individuals they seek to hire.
So long as the census continues to count persons in the United States rather than citizens in the United States, youre going to see these kinds of impacts on apportionment, Arthur stated. The states that have the largest unauthorized populations, aside from Florida and parts of Texas, are in Democratic run states.
The political backdrop for this maneuvering includes two high-profile enforcement operations that Democrats have used to fuel their anti-ICE campaign. Renee Good, an American citizen, was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7 after allegedly weaponizing her vehicle and forcing the agent to fire defensive shots.
Later that month, Alex Pretti, an American citizen strapped with a firearm, was killed amid a scuffle with Border Patrol agents. The back-to-back incidents sparked intense backlash across the country, including calls for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign.
Democrats also triggered a partial federal government shutdown as they demanded a series of reforms be imposed on deportation officers, such as the removal of face masks on agents and tougher regulations around arrest warrants. However, more dramatic action is being taken at state and local offices where Democrats control the levers of power.
Democratic Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger rolled back an executive order in January that directed state law enforcement officials to assist ICE and other federal immigration authorities. The states Legislature, also controlled by Democrats, introduced several bills that would further hinder ICEs ability to take custody of criminal illegal migrants, including bans on operations in courthouses or near polling stations.
Several weeks prior, Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills allowed a sanctuary bill to go into law and rescinded an executive order promoting ICE cooperation in her state. These moves signal a broader realignment in which Democratic leaders are not merely tolerating sanctuary policies but actively embedding them into state law and administrative practice.
ICE is creating fear and confusion across the county including among U.S. citizens and other people who are here legally and that fear is undermining public safety, Democratic Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan said while announcing a sanctuary executive order in January forbidding city personnel and resources for federal civil immigration enforcement. Maryland Democrats rushed emergency legislation to block ICE cooperation after a new detention facility was announced in late January.
In New York, California and elsewhere, Democrats are pushing legislation to enable people to more easily sue ICE agents deployed in their neighborhoods, potentially opening up the Department of Homeland Security to mountains of litigation that would hamstring enforcement operations. For conservatives, these efforts look less like a good-faith attempt to balance civil liberties and public safety and more like a deliberate campaign to nullify federal immigration law for partisan gain.
During President Donald Trumps first year back inside the Oval Office, more than 622,000 illegal migrants have been deported. Another 1.9 million illegal migrants chose to self-deport during that time.
The hardline immigration enforcement agenda has contributed to the U.S. achieving negative net migration for the first time in decades. That success has intensified the stakes of the fight over sanctuary policies, as blue states seek to offset domestic out-migration by retaining as many foreign nationals as possible including those in the country illegally ahead of the next Census count.
Redistricting is a re-drawing of a states congressional districts that is required to take place after the Census, which occurs every decade as required by the Constitution. In states where they have control, GOP and Democrat politicians are already battling tooth-and-nail to reconfigure maps in their partys favor, a process known as gerrymandering.
Democrats have suggested in the past that they wish to use mass migration in their favor, such as when New York Democrat Rep. Yvette Clarke spoke on Haitian immigration during an October 2021 congressional committee hearing. Im from Brooklyn, New York, Clarke said at the time. We have a diaspora that can absorb a significant number of these migrants and that, you know, when I hear colleagues talk about the doors of the inn being closed [and] no room in the inn, Im saying I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes.
For many on the right, Clarkes remarks confirmed what had long been suspected: that progressive immigration policy is not merely about compassion but about engineering a new electorate and shoring up Democratic power in urban districts. The current Census rules, which count persons rather than citizens, create a structural incentive for states to attract and retain large non-citizen populations, regardless of legal status.
Some population analysts say that the complete removal of the illegal immigration population would not necessarily be a complete loss for the Democratic Party. Taking the unauthorized immigrants out of the apportionment population would cost the Republicans a seat, Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew Research Center, told the DCNF.
Passel noted that Texas holds a significant illegal migrant population while a slate of blue states, such as Oregon and Minnesota, do not. At the same time, he said it can be difficult to fully account for the illegal population in the Census, as they are naturally a difficult group to track.
We get data every month from the Current Population Survey. Its used to measure unemployment, and were seeing a decline in the immigrant population in that survey, Passel continued. We know that the immigrant population is likely getting smaller because theres hardly any immigrants, legal or otherwise, coming in and some immigrants are always leaving, and in addition, they are deporting immigrants.
Trump sought to exclude illegal migrants from the Census during his first term in office, a move blocked by the courts. In August 2025, the Republican president announced an order for a new Census that excluded the authorized population, but so far no major changes have been made and illegal migrants are expected to be counted in the next Census opening the door for this group to be utilized.
The current method of counting illegal immigrants for purposes of representation serves as a perverse incentive for open borders to boost the relative political power of the states and voters that court it, stated an October 2025 press release from Florida GOP Sen. Ashley Moody. Moody, working alongside a handful of other Republican senators, introduced the Equal Representation Act, legislation ensuring that only legal citizens were factored into the count for congressional districts.
After years of open borders under Biden, states like California have unfairly inflated their electoral counts by including illegal immigrants, boosting their political power while diluting the vote from actual Americans, Moody stated during the bills rollout. We are fighting to ensure that our voter rolls and congressional representation accurately reflects our citizenry.
The clash over how to count illegal migrants in the Census now sits at the intersection of constitutional law, demographic reality and raw partisan interest. With blue states doubling down on sanctuary policies and a Trump administration pressing for stricter enforcement and citizen-based representation, the outcome will determine not only how many seats each state holds, but whose voices carry weight in Washington for the next decade.
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