Joe Biden's use of the term "illegal" during his State of the Union address wasn't even part of the script. Biden was responding to some heckling from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and used the "offensive" term without thinking.
I'm sure the man accused of murdering young nursing student Laken Riley accepted the president's apology. Jose Antonio Ibarra arrived with his wife from Venezuela in September 2022, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Because he was from Venezuela, he received "temporary protected status," which is kind of a legal limbo. He wasn't legal nor was he illegal.
Conditions in Venezuela are so dangerous that sending anyone back would be mean. And the last thing Biden wants is to appear mean to illegal aliens. Mr. Ibarra was allowed to stay.
He was put on a bus and sent to New York City. Like a lot of illegals, he got a delivery job, using a moped to make deliveries. Ibarra was arrested by the NYPD when he allowed his 5-year-old son to ride on his moped without a helmet. The police could have given him over to ICE but never quite got around to it.
Realizing that New York was not a safe place to hang out, Ibarra traveled to Athens, Ga., to live with his brother. About a month after being arrested in New York, he was arrested in Athens for shoplifting. He and his brother allegedly took "bacon, smoked sausage, queso fresco cheese and some clothes."
For some reason, the Athens police never called ICE to pick up Ibarra and send him home.
“Our officers do not have immediate access to immigration status. … According to ICE’s 287(g) program, the general process of identifying and removing non-citizens with criminal or pending charges arrested by state and local law enforcement agencies is handled during the booking process by the law enforcement agency responsible for the jail.”
But Ibarra and his brother were never taken into custody. They received what amounted to a traffic ticket for shoplifting and were allowed to go their merry way.
Democrats like to talk about a "broken" immigration system. It certainly is that. But it's not just broken when it comes to allowing people in, it's also broken when it comes to kicking people out.
And as Laken Riley and her family discovered to their infinite pain, that's a huge problem.
Related: Biden 'Regrets' Calling Illegal Alien Murder Suspect 'Illegal'
So the question becomes why in the name of all that is decent did Joe Biden apologize for using the term "illegal" and to whom was he apologizing? In 2012 there was an article published in the New York Times detailing the newspaper's use of the term "illegal immigrant" in the face of pressure from radical immigration activists who claimed that the word "illegal" is "dehumanizing."
After immigration activist Jose Antonio Vargas launched a campaign to monitor the use of the term by major news outlets, The New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan started an investigation of her own. Sullivan called for readers to respond to the debate and interviewed immigration reporter Julia Preston, who said that while their standards book could use more flexibility, "illegal immigrant" is not wrong. "It's accurate and it considers the broad terms of the debate," Preston told Sullivan. "We shouldn't be banning an accurate term."
A group of linguists put out a statement claiming "that 'illegal immigrant' should not be the preferred phrasing because it's imprecise and frames the debate in narrow terms."
This is nuts. How is illegal immigrant "imprecise"? Language doesn't get any more precise than describing the legal status of an immigrant. There are exactly two choices when it comes to that and since the immigrant entered the country without permission, they are once, always, and forever illegal.
The use of the term "undocumented" is a deliberate attempt to obscure the truth. Language, by its most fundamental definition, should illuminate, not obscure.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member