Hours after taking office, President Joe Biden handed Texas a huge gift that went mostly unnoticed, overshadowed by more controversial moves on climate, public health and the border wall. He reversed Donald Trump’s policy of excluding unauthorized immigrants from the Census count used to carve up the country into congressional districts

Lloyd Potter, Texas’ state demographer, took it a step further. Biden’s new policy isn’t just a gift for Texas. It’s a gift especially for Texas Republicans, since they control the Legislature and Governor’s mansion, and wield the knife that cuts the growing pie. “Whatever party’s in power maximizes the number of seats for the party,” Potter said. Under Trump’s proposal, “We definitely wouldn’t have gotten three. Maybe as few as one. It would certainly have diluted our representation.”

Senator Joan Huffman (R - Houston) announced on Thursday, January 21, 2021, that the Texas Senate Redistricting Committee will hold a series of regional hearings to solicit testimony from the public about the upcoming redistricting process.

Dr. Lloyd Potter, Director of the Texas Demographic Center, will provide invited testimony about population projections for the State, for each region. 2020 Census data will not be available until later this year.

When the Census Bureau releases its decennial study of the American public this year, it is likely to show a population getting much older and much more diverse — and much less mobile.

Government statisticians are finalizing census counts that will be used to apportion both seats in the House of Representatives and billions of dollars in federal programs over the next 10 years. They will roll out formal census data, from state-level population estimates to block-by-block counts of residents, throughout 2021.

“The pandemic threw a loop-de-loop curve ball at the census effort. They’ve been planning this for over a decade and with thousands of temporary staff being on and off again, local get-out-the-count organizations running out of money and steam, and the deadline for ending data collection kept moving,” said Lloyd Potter, Texas’s state demographer and a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio.