# Executive Order 13986 **Signed January 20, 2021 · 86 FR 7015 (published Jan. 25, 2021).** Biden's first-day census order. It reversed in one page the Trump administration's 2019–20 effort to remove people without lawful status from the count that divides the House. ## What it did - **Policy (Section 2):** reapportionment must count "the total number of persons residing in each State," **"without regard for immigration status."** That is the whole-persons rule of the [[Fourteenth Amendment]] and 2 U.S.C. § 2a, restated as executive policy. - **Direction:** the Secretary of Commerce was to report whole-persons tabulations to the President under 13 U.S.C. § 141(b) and (c). - **Revocations (Section 5):** - [[Executive Order 13880]] (July 11, 2019), which ordered agencies to compile citizenship data from administrative records after [[Department of Commerce v. New York]] blocked the citizenship question. - The **July 21, 2020 presidential memorandum** "Excluding Illegal Aliens From the Apportionment Base." The Supreme Court had dismissed the challenge to it as unripe in [[Trump v. New York]] (Dec 2020), which left the question open for whoever held office in January. ## Its revocation and what followed [[Executive Order 14148]] revoked it as item 2(b) on **January 20, 2025**, exactly four years later. Nothing replaced it at first. The whole-persons rule did not lapse, because it rests on the Constitution and the apportionment statute rather than on executive policy. What lapsed was the executive branch's affirmative commitment to it. The record since then: - **Aug 7, 2025.** Trump posted that he had told Commerce to start work on a **"new" census** excluding people in the country illegally, drawing on "results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024." No order or memorandum followed. Experts told ABC that a President cannot order a census on his own. - **Jan 30, 2026.** Missouri sued to redo the 2020 apportionment without unauthorized immigrants ([[Missouri v. Department of Commerce]]). It dropped the suit in September after the rule below was published. - **Sept 10, 2026.** The [[2030 Census Residence Rule]] (91 FR 57524) proposed counting only citizens and lawful permanent residents for apportionment, and asked for comment on a legal-status question. This is the exact inverse of EO 13986, and it was done through notice-and-comment rulemaking rather than presidential direction. The rule cites the July 2020 memorandum that 13986 had revoked. Comments close **Oct 13, 2026**. The sequence is the point. A first-day order states a policy, the next administration's first-day order deletes it, and the fight moves to the form of law most likely to survive review. ## See also - [[How the Census Apportions Congress]] · [[How a Census Question Is Added or Removed]] · [[Census Citizenship Question]] - [[Trump v. New York]] · [[Department of Commerce v. New York]] · [[Executive Order 13880]] - [[2020 Census]] · [[2030 Census Residence Rule]] · [[Census Bureau]]