A top Biden-appointed immigration official issued a memo last week directing immigration judges to stop using the term “illegal aliens” to describe illegal aliens.
In a July 23 memo titled “Terminology,” Acting Director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review Jean King directed immigration judges to instead use terms such as “undocumented noncitizen” and “undocumented individual.”
King also directed judges to stop using the term “unaccompanied alien child” to describe unaccompanied alien children, directing them to use terms such as “unaccompanied non-citizen child” and “unaccompanied non-U.S. citizen child.”
The memo references a pair of President Joe Biden’s executive orders and notes that neither uses the term “alien” or “illegal alien” to describe illegal aliens. It also points to two recent Supreme Court opinions in which the justices opted to substitute the term “noncitizen” for the statutory term “alien.”
“The phrase ‘illegal aliens’ has taken on a pejorative tone in recent years, and in response, some institutions have determined that they will cease to use it,” the Library of Congress decision stated. “After deliberation, the meeting participants determined that the heading Aliens will be revised to Noncitizens.”
King’s memo notes that the only exception for the new language mandate is when “when quoting a statute, regulation, legal opinion, court order, or settlement agreement.”
Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and now a resident fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, wrote that King’s directive set an “extremely sinister precedent.”
Staff at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) have already been barred from using the term “illegal alien,” according to The Washington Post and Axios respectively.