The federal government’s deportation agency has overturned a Biden-era ban on using words like “illegal” and “alien” when referring to immigrants, The Washington Times has learned.
Caleb Vitello, acting director at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, announced the change in a memo to employees on Tuesday.
“Moving forward, for all communications materials and for internal and external communications, ICE employees are directed to use the lexicon consistent with the Immigration and Nationality Act and the language historically used by the agency,” he wrote.
That revokes a 2021 policy imposed on the orders of former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that banned “illegal,” “alien” and “assimilation” as demeaning terms when it came to people living in the country illegally.
Department leaders in the Biden era ordered employees — including Border Patrol agents and ICE deportation officers — to use “undocumented,” “noncitizen,” “migrant” and “integration” instead.
In court cases, where agents were charging a border jumper with illegal entry, they were told to refer to the accused lawbreakers as “undocumented noncitizens.”
Similar policies were adopted at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Customs and Border Protection, which along with ICE are the three major immigration agencies at Homeland Security. The Justice Department adopted similar changes.
The Times has reached out to those agencies for this story.
It’s not clear whether anyone was punished for violating the policy.
Adherence, which began strong early in the Biden years, waned by the final months, according to information gleaned from The Times’ smuggling case database, which catalogs thousands of legal filings by immigration agents and officers.
Andrew “Art” Arthur, a former immigration judge and ICE attorney, said Mr. Mayorkas’ experiment was “utterly unsuccessful” if its goal was to change the terms of the immigration debate.
“Substantively it didn’t have any impact,” he said.
But Mr. Arthur, now a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said it did have a chilling effect on law enforcement officers at Homeland Security.
“When you threaten to punish people for using the wrong nomenclature, it’s just another cudgel that you can use to enforce compliance with all of your other rules that hinder enforcement,” he said.
The word ban led to some bizarre lexical mishaps.
The federal prosecutor’s office in southern Texas, for example, issued a number of press releases referring to “undocumented citizens.”
The U.S. attorney in Arizona made the same mistake in one of his press releases, as did Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE.
Mr. Mayorkas and other Biden officials would frequently point to the word ban as a sign of bigger changes afoot.
“Sometimes language is so very, very important,” then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki told an audience of lawyers after the ban took effect. “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 ’noncitizens’ to reflect that their lawful presence or their unlawful presence in the United States does not define their dignity as individuals.”
The focus on words contrasted with the administration’s approach to the border, where Mr. Mayorkas and Ms. Psaki resisted the “crisis” label.
“I am not focused on language,” Mr. Mayorkas told lawmakers.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.