Trump wanted to make English the official language of the United States. But I want to speak Spanish.
On Saturday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designating English as the country’s official language. Speaking in front of Congress on Tuesday, he again said that he had made English the official language of the US.
But as my colleague Julianne McShane recently wrote, what the order actually does is rescind an earlier executive order signed by Bill Clinton in 2000, which required government agencies and organizations that received federal funding to offer language assistance to non–English speakers. Agencies now have to decide for themselves whether they will offer documents and services in different languages.
This isn’t the first time Trump has attacked people for speaking other languages. He mocked Jeb Bush during the 2016 Republican primary for speaking Spanish, and has warned of languages coming into the United States that “nobody in this country has ever heard of.” I assume he wasn’t talking about the word “covfefe.”
In the executive order, Trump called the action a way to “promote unity” and “cultivate a shared American culture,” but critics disagree. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus responded to the executive order on X, formerly Twitter, by saying that the country “has never had an official language” and that the order was an “attack on our diversity”—and also that the tens of millions of Americans who speak other languages aren’t “any less American” for it.
67.8 million Americans, to be exact. That’s one in every five people living in the United States. The most popular language outside of English is Spanish, with about 13 percent of the population, or 41.7 million people, speaking it at home in 2019.
The Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus responded to the order by calling it an “attempt to allow federal agencies to discriminate against immigrants and individuals with limited English proficiency.”
Immigration advocates view the executive order as another attempt by the Trump administration to make immigrants feel like they don’t belong in the country. As Anabel Mendoza, communications director of immigration advocacy group United We Dream, told the Associated Press, “Trump is trying to send the message that if you’re not white, rich, and speak English, you don’t belong here.”
“Immigrants are here to stay,” Mendoza concluded. “No matter how hard Trump tries, he can’t erase us.”
