A new policy memorandum from the Biden administration took effect Monday which seeks to end the use of what are, in fact, accurate terms for illegal aliens by those handling the adjudication of immigration cases.
The memo first circulated last week within the Department of Justice explains that "illegal alien" and associated legal terms are not to be used in internal or external communications within the subgroup that handles immigration cases and that such apparently intolerable terminology be replaced with more woke social justice-y language.
It's all part of President Biden's larger practice of implementing Orwellian "newspeak" regarding illegal immigrants across the executive branch that his administration confusingly refers to as "welcoming strategies" for the ever-growing number of illegal immigrants who have predictably ignored warnings of "do not come."
But welcoming in this situation could apparently be replaced with speech-policing. It's part of the Biden administration's effort to control not just what immigration officials do but also how they speak and write all stemming from President Biden’s Executive Order 14012 "on Restoring Faith in Our Legal Immigration Systems and Strengthening Integration and Inclusion Efforts for New Americans."
The memo — effective June 26 — from Acting Director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review Jean King "clarifies proper terminology at the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), and directs EOIR staff, including adjudicators, to use language that is '[consistent] with our character as a Nation of opportunity and of welcome.'"
The EOIR's mission, according to their website, is "to adjudicate immigration cases by fairly, expeditiously, and uniformly interpreting and administering the Nation's immigration laws" while it "conducts immigration court proceedings, appellate reviews, and administrative hearings."
King's memo includes a handy chart of the new "current" acceptable terminology which "will be used in EOIR decisions and for both internal and external communications."
Instead of "alien," the new allowable terms are "respondent, applicant, petitioner, beneficiary, migrant, noncitizen, or non-U.S. citizen."
Rather than saying or writing "undocumented alien or illegal alien," EOIR staff must now use "undocumented noncitizen, undocumented non-U.S. citizen, or undocumented individual."
And in lieu of "unaccompanied alien child," the terms "unaccompanied noncitizen child, unaccompanied non-U.S. citizen child, or UC" will now be used.
The Biden admin has also changed the name of the Fugitive Operations initiative, known as SOAR, from "Sex Offender Alien Removal" to "Sex Offender Arrest and Removal". Wouldn't want to offend criminal aliens with accurate legal terminology, I suppose. https://t.co/TuwfYf7S57 pic.twitter.com/ljO8nDAbDi
— Jon Feere (@JonFeere) July 27, 2021
The only exception to the Biden administration's newspeak "is when quoting a statute, regulation, legal opinion, court order, or settlement agreement." This makes sense because as the Center for Immigration Studies points out, “'noncitizen' is not a word, at least not in a legal sense" and "the now-banned word 'alien' is the law."
Considering the Biden administration has proven willing to claim with a straight face that the insanely open border is actually closed while denying for months there's any crisis of illegal immigration, rewriting the language used by those deciding immigration cases is hardly surprising. But that doesn't make it any less concerning.
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