In an otherwise strong State of the Union address this March, President Joe Biden breathed new life into a term the immigrant rights movement has spent years pushing out of the Democratic vocabulary. He was stumbling over a sentence; right-wing Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was heckling him from the audience about a young woman in Georgia who’d allegedly been killed the month prior by a non-U.S. citizen. Apparently parroting Greene, Biden confirmed that the woman, Laken Riley, had been killed “by an illegal.”
Backlash was swift from pro-immigrant Congress members and advocates who’ve long fought for the idea that “No human being is illegal.” (For what it’s worth, the alleged killer had reportedly been released into the country through a stopgap parole mechanism.) “The rhetoric President Biden used tonight was dangerously close to language from Donald Trump that puts a target on the backs of Latinos everywhere,” warned San Antonio Congressman Joaquin Castro.
The president went on television two days later to acknowledge he should have used a more respectful word like “undocumented,” describing such rhetorical choices as a “difference between Trump and [him].” Asked point-blank if he regretted his wording, he said yes. But—after Biden’s apparent apology was mocked by Trump and the GOP U.S. House speaker—a White House spokesperson insisted at a press briefing, “The president absolutely did not apologize.”
