Joe Biden Broke His Own Rules

President Joe Biden broke his own rules last week after using a term that he banned his own agencies from using.

During his State of the Union address, Biden referred to the Venezuelan migrant arrested and charged for the killing of 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley as "an illegal." While the president quickly faced blowback from members of his party, he also defied an order that he handed down in the early days of his administration.

In April 2021, the Biden administration laid out new guidance to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), requiring agencies to replace the terms "illegal alien" and "assimilation" with "undocumented noncitizen" and "integration." The move was a departure from the previous administration, which referred to undocumented immigrants as "illegal aliens" and described border crossings as an "invasion."

Newsweek reached out to the White House via email for comment.

The change mirrored an earlier modification at U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services, which had signed a memo in February of that year encouraging "more inclusive language in the agency's outreach efforts, internal documents and in overall communication with stakeholders, partners and the general public."

"We set a tone and example for our country and partners across the world," CBP's acting commissioner, Troy Miller, previously wrote in an April 2021 memo. "We enforce our nation's laws while also maintaining the dignity of every individual with whom we interact. The words we use matter and will serve to further confer that dignity to those in our custody."

But Biden appeared to deviate from his administration's efforts to create what it calls a more "humane" immigration system after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene heckled Biden into addressing the death of Riley last Thursday. The president responded by referring to the student as "an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal," before going on to tell her parents, "My heart goes out to you, having lost children myself."

Biden's off-the-cuff remark sparked anger from progressive Democrats and immigration advocates, as well as Republicans who used those criticisms to argue that Democrats were ignoring the human toll of Biden's border policies.

Biden retracted those comments days later in an interview with MSNBC, saying, "I shouldn't have used 'illegal.' It's 'undocumented,'" and answering "yes" when asked if he regretted his choice of words.

His 2024 rival, former President Donald Trump, quickly seized on the reversal over the weekend. At a campaign rally in Riley's home state of Georgia, Trump told his supporters, "Joe Biden went on television and apologized for calling Laken's murderer an illegal. Biden should be apologizing for apologizing to this killer."

The White House clarified on Monday that Biden "absolutely did not apologize" for his use of the term "illegal."

"I want to be really clear about something: the president absolutely did not apologize. There was no apology anywhere in that conversation," Principal Deputy Press Secretary Olivia Dalton told reporters. "He did not apologize. He used a different word."