During the 2025 Grammy Awards—the same night he made outdated quips about Colombian cocainewhen speaking about Shakira—host Trevor Noah joked that 13,000 members of the Recording Academy had voted for the night’s winners—before adding, “and 20 million illegal immigrants.” The joke led to massive backlash online and an eyeroll from Doechii on the night. But what stood out wasn’t the premise, which made fun of the false right-wing conspiracy theory that undocumented immigrants are voting in huge numbers. It was the language Noah used.

It’s hardly the only recent use of the term “illegal immigrant” by a public figure associated with the left—or at least onenot in the MAGA movement. Joe Biden infamously did so as president, later expressing regret, in response to heckling from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene during a State of the Union address. Andrew Cuomo used it during New York’s final mayoral Democratic primary debate when discussing people hired for cleaning services by the city’s transit authority.

Advocates have nowbeen pushing back for more than a decade against the use of the word “illegal” to describe individuals.Lindsay Schubiner, director of programs at Western States Center, an advocacy group that recently published guidelines for journalists on responsible immigration coverage, says the term embeds an accusation of criminality and fuels racial profiling. The term “flattens people,” Schubiner says, and “paints a whole group of diverse human beings with rich lives as subhuman.” Jon Rodney, narrative strategy director at the Immigrant Defense Project, contends that the term not onlyfuels racial profiling but is legally inaccurate: immigration cases are generally civil, not criminal, matters.

But before 2010, “illegal” was standard language among mainstream news organizations covering immigration, which led the nonprofit Race Forward to campaign against its use on the grounds that it was dehumanizing, biased, and ran counter to due process (Rinku Sen, then the organization’s executive director, is a member of the Center for Investigative Reporting’s board of directors). In 2013, the Associated Press updated its stylebook, an industry standard, to no longer sanction its use to describe a person, rather than an action. The New York Times began discouraging its use the same year. Both moves seemed to have wider ripple effects.

Even people in left-leaning areas are now more likely to use dehumanizing terms for undocumented people.

I looked at national data from Google Trends, which measures the use of search terms, dating back to 2010, to compare the frequency of searches for “undocumented immigrants” vs. “illegal immigrants.” There is, of course, the caveat that we don’t know exactly why people search certain terms. As a journalist, I often have to search for terms I’d never use in real life in order to find out what certain people have said about a topic, but most people don’t use Google that way. The other caveat is that people also use other search terms that this dataset wouldn’t cover.

In that data, “undocumented” has never been the leading term, but the Race Forward campaign and subsequent style guide changes seem to have narrowed the gap: In 2010, for every 20 searches for “illegal immigrants,” there was onlyone for “undocumented immigrants.” By 2013, when AP updated its style guide, that had decreased to a ratio of 8 to 1. In 2016, it was 7 to 1—and even continued decreasing during Donald Trump’s first term, all the way to 3 to 1 in 2020. But in 2021, the trend began to reverse.

In 2021, the popularity of searches for “illegal” over “undocumented” immigrants increased to 4 to 1, and to 5 to 1 by 2024. That tracks the increased frequency and visibilityof vile, hateful rhetoric fromTrump and his allies—often accompanied by misinformation about immigrant communities—in the lead-up to his reelection. Advocates I spoke with repeatedly warned about Trump’s use of the word “invasion” when attacking immigrants; Schubiner says that Trump’s language has “been moving closer and closer to the white nationalist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which claims a white genocide is being orchestrated through immigration.” Cathy Buerger, director of research at the Dangerous Speech Project, a nonprofit that studies speechthat leads to violence, says Trump’s characterization of migration as an invasion and his repeated use of “military-aged men” to describe people coming across the border “ups the ante on the rhetoric of describing migrants…as a threat to the nation.”

That language isn’t just affecting how the right speaks about immigration. It’s also normalizing the use of loaded, anti-immigrant language by those who oppose the Trump administration’s policies. Even anecdotally, I’ve heard multiple friends in the last few months use the “I-word” in the process of expressing outrage against the administration’s actions on immigration, a trap even well-meaning people can fall into.

Google Trends data bears that out as well, indicating that even left-leaning areas are now more likely to use dehumanizing language when referring to undocumented people. In blue states, the ratio of searches for “illegal” vs. “undocumented” immigrants has also increased: in the 10 states with the biggest Democratic margins in the 2024 presidential election, the ratio went from 2 to 1 in 2020 to 3 to 1 in 2024.

Schubiner doesn’t find that surprising—“The mainstreaming of anti-immigrant language,” she says, “has escalated at really breakneck speed.” Julie Hollar, senior analyst at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a progressive media watchdog, lays some of the blame on the way mainstream outlets cover immigration: large publications have increasingly returned to using the term without quotation marks, she says, leading readers to “just assume that is the standard language, and that it is perfectly acceptable and not loaded.”

“The mainstreaming of anti-immigrant language,” Schubiner says, “has escalated at really breakneck speed.”

Broadcast news seems to be following suit: CNN host Abby Phillip used the term during a recent panel discussion about new polling showing growing American support for immigration.

Hollar, like many other advocates, also points out the dehumanizing nature, and danger, of the constant use of natural disaster language in immigration coverage: words like “surge,” “flood,” and “wave,” which Hollar says obscure individual human beings and characterize them as “a faceless, threatening group.”

Such language, Buerger warns, has served as a precursor to violence throughout history, a practice she calls “probably as old as human society,” citing historical examples like the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide—now boosted further by social media, as in Myanmar, where Facebook and other platforms were blamed for platforming ethnic violence against the Rohingya people. The Trump administration’s executive orders on immigration, Buerger points out, often include a paragraph using the language of threat to justify the actions being taken.

Less loaded, more humane language, Rodney believes, wouldreflect the fact that all our lives have value. “We’re seeing ICE agents abduct our neighbors, disappear students in broad daylight, smash the windows of workers’ cars, and render people to a torture camp,” he says. “In this moment when we talk about language, I think what should ultimately guide us is shared humanity.”

“As dehumanizing rhetoric becomes more mainstream, that just opens up further avenues for violence and horrific policies,” says Schubiner. “What impact does it have on people’s ability to trust each other, to participate in democratic processes, to believe in equal rights under the law in this country?”

Trevor Noah’s management did not respond to requests for comment.

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