President Biden’s team has spent years trying to erase the use of the term “illegal alien” to describe the people surging across the border. Mr. Biden upended all of that work in just a few seconds during his address to Congress.
In an off-the-cuff exchange with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mr. Biden said the illegal immigrant accused of killing Laken Riley is “an illegal.”
It drew sniffs of disapproval from key Democratic allies.
“He should have said undocumented,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told CNN.
And Rep. Chuy Garcia, an Illinois Democrat who is one of his party’s leading voices on immigration, took to social media to express his displeasure.
“As a proud immigrant, I’m extremely disappointed to hear President Biden use the word ’illegal,’” he wrote.
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Immigrant rights advocates were sterner in their condemnation. They consider the term archaic and insulting, saying it reduces humans to a crime. A common slogan on signs and T-shirts at immigration rallies reads: “No one is illegal.”
“Degrading our immigrant communities with the word ’illegal’ is nothing short of unacceptable,” the National Partnership for New Americans said. “This language is extremely dangerous and deeply harmful for many in immigrant communities who experience racism and xenophobia.”
That view has become orthodoxy within much of the media and at the Biden administration itself, where the Justice Department and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued directives that employees stop using terms such as “illegal alien.”
The preferred term in the media is “undocumented,” while the government leans heavily on “noncitizen” as its label.
“Sometimes language is so very, very important,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told a gathering of lawyers in 2021, soon after ordering the changes. “I happen to think it’s always important, but in the immigration space, we issue a directive that the term ’illegal aliens’ should not be used unless one is citing the particular statutory language that exists. But we should refer to those individuals as ’non-citizens’ to reflect that their lawful presence or their unlawful presence in the United States does not define their dignity as individuals.”
Department employees took note of the president’s words.
“I guess we can call them aliens if the boss is saying illegals,” said one employee.
The Washington Times has reached out to Homeland Security for comment for this story.
Both Mr. Mayorkas and the Justice Department said their directives changing language were done to carry out Mr. Biden’s wishes, as expressed in multiple executive orders, to offer a more welcoming experience to people coming to the U.S. from other nations.
Mr. Biden on Friday defended his use of the term for Jose Ibarra, the Venezuelan man accused of killing Riley. He was caught and released under the administration’s “parole” program, and remained here despite later encounters with police.
“Technically he’s not supposed to be here,” the president said.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre seemed to blame Ms. Greene for the term.
“He was responding to what was being hurled at him as you all covered and he was responding to that moment and that exchange,” she said of the president.
The Biden administration’s orders policing language have produced some bizarre bungles.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas has issued several press releases referring to “undocumented citizens” in criminal cases.
Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, defended the use of “illegal alien.”
Mr. Judd, who was present for Thursday’s State of the Union speech as a guest of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, Arizona independent, said the issue wasn’t Mr. Biden’s words but rather Mr. Mayorkas’ attempts to police language.
“The legal language in our laws is an illegal alien,” he said. “Until that gets changed you should be using that language.”
He said the push to “water down the language” can leave people with a wrong impression about the facts. He said he’s spoken with people who don’t know that crossing the border between the ports of entry is an actual crime — one which the Border Patrol can make an arrest and U.S. attorneys can prosecute.
Art Arthur, a former immigration judge who’s now at the Center for Immigration Studies, said the Biden administration’s preferred term of “noncitizen” is problematic for several reasons, including that it ends up including people in American Samoa who are considered nationals of the U.S., but not citizens.
He said U.S. law is peppered with the phrase “illegal alien” for a reason: “Everybody knows what it means.”
• Jeff Mordock contributed to this story.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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