A column published this week by American Thinker proposes repurposing the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey into what amounts to a screening tool for deportation — asking respondents how much they love their town, state or country, and then potentially routing those who admit to anti-American sentiment toward law enforcement.
The piece, headlined “Facilitating deportations of illegal aliens” and written by Noel S. Williams on October 21, 2026, argues for adding a fifth question category to the survey’s existing four: demographic, social, economic and housing characteristics. The author’s suggested addition would be called “Americanization Characteristics,” asking about a respondent’s level of assimilation into their local community — a nod, Williams writes, to the survey’s name.
What the Column Proposes
The ACS is sent by the Census Bureau to randomly selected households throughout the year. Williams notes that residents potentially including illegal aliens are included in the survey rolls, and that the questions span age, race, ancestry, citizenship status, income, employment, homeownership and other measures.
According to the piece, the proposed new category would use what Williams calls a sliding scale to ask, “to what extent do you love your town/state/country?” If the response reflects a degree of anti-Americanism, the author writes, the survey would branch off to ask which country the respondent would prefer to live in, listing countries described as amenable to accepting deportees — Honduras, Uganda, and South Sudan “with limitations” among them.
Williams acknowledges that personally identifiable survey data cannot legally be released but argues that aggregated data could still inform decision-makers. The Census Bureau, the column notes, tracks the specific addresses that return surveys online or by mail, so it would know which geographic region corresponds to each batch of responses. On that basis, the author argues, communities with many residents who willfully admit to not loving the country might be of interest to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Author’s Own Framing
The column is explicitly an opinion piece, and it reads like one — laced with references to “social capital,” Robert Putnam’s “bowling alone” thesis about civic disengagement, and a barbed aside about “socialist Dems” who, in the author’s framing, demand open borders while immigrants showing “professed disdain” for the country undermine their grandstanding.
Williams singles out Rep. Ilhan Omar as an example of a respondent who “hates her host country,” and suggests the survey results would support what the author frames as an act of generosity rather than punishment: giving people what they want by “humanely deporting them to their preferred overseas destination.” The stated standard is assimilation. Unless residents are “Americanized in accord with our founding principles and way of life,” Williams writes, using a Spanish farewell for emphasis, they should go.
The piece closes with a suggestion to “put AI to work” on collecting and compiling ACS data, and a reference to foreign visitors at the recent World Cup who, the author says, marveled that patriotic Americans are the friendliest of people. The argument is that Americans don’t “bowl alone” — so those who don’t love the country, and show no interest in assimilating, should “show the courage of your convictions.”
A Familiar Policy Debate, Wearing a New Mechanic
Strip away the tone and what’s left is a proposal to turn a statistical instrument into a sorting mechanism. That is a substantial departure from how the American Community Survey actually works. The survey’s design and its confidentiality protections — the legal bar on releasing individually identifiable responses — exist precisely so that households answer honestly without fear of consequences.
Williams does not dispute that barrier; the column’s argument rests on aggregation, contending that regional data would be enough to point enforcement in useful directions. Whether that distinction holds up is the crux of the disagreement the piece invites. A community with a high share of respondents expressing dissatisfaction with the country is not the same thing as a list of removable individuals, and the column’s own acknowledgment of that gap sits in tension with the confident closing lines about guiding deportation efforts.
There is also the matter of what the survey is legally required to do. Williams notes that completing the ACS is mandatory — and argues that mandatory participation strengthens the case, since a respondent who dislikes the country is, in the author’s view, being offered a magnanimous exit rather than a penalty.
The Broader Argument
At its core the column is less about questionnaires than about the terms of belonging. Williams grants “plenty of room for disagreement about policy intricacies” but draws a line at assimilation, framing it as a two-way bargain: openness, in the author’s phrasing, “works both ways.”
Critics of the proposal would see something different — a mechanism for converting opinion polling into enforcement targeting, and one aimed disproportionately at communities the author already names with a sneer. Supporters of stricter immigration policy who might sympathize with the assimilation argument still face the practical question the column doesn’t fully answer: how a statistically aggregated sentiment question translates into individual deportation decisions without the kind of address-level data the law forbids releasing.
For now the proposal exists as an argument in an opinion column, not as policy. The Census Bureau has not announced any change to the ACS; the column is a suggestion from a commentator, published as a blog entry on immigration. But it captures a strain of thinking that treats the administrative machinery of American life — surveys, data collection, even the artificial intelligence the author wants pointed at the results — as instruments for deciding who stays.
Williams’s final image is the visitor at the World Cup marveling at American friendliness. The column’s conclusion is that friendliness has a limit, and that the ACS is the place to test it.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/facilitating-deportations-of-illegal-aliens/