Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, has been watching Democrats and media outlets lecture Biden after he called Jose Antonio Ibarra an “illegal,” shorthand for illegal alien, in his March 7 address to the nation.
The use of that word, which came during a rare unscripted moment, was followed by days of Democrats and media outlets demanding the President apologize for uttering it, which he eventually did.
"We have not seen an outpouring of sympathy to the Riley family," Mehlman says of angry Democrats, "but apparently we have offended people by using the legally correct term illegal alien."
Using the term “illegal alien” or “illegal immigrant” is verboten among Democrats and liberal media outlets, who consider that term racist and xenophobic. The accepted phrase according to them is “undocumented immigrants,” or even just a vague reference to “immigrants” without any reference to their legal status which is a trespassing non-citizen.
“There was a lot of good in President Biden’s speech tonight, but his rhetoric about immigrants was incendiary and wrong,” Democrat Rep. Joaquin Castro posted on X after the State of the Union speech.
“Let me be clear: No human being is illegal,” Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar, a legal immigrant from Somalia, posted on X after Biden’s address.
According to a USA Today story, Biden used “outdated language” that has been “long abandoned” by Democrats to refer to people who enter the country illegally.
Biden called her 'Lincoln'
During an unscripted moment in front of Congress, Biden mustered a look of anger, held up a button with Riley's name, and said she was “an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal.”
Biden also mispronounced her name – “Lincoln” – when he mentioned her, but that faux pas for a murdered American citizen has gone ignored by the Left, which focused instead on the description of Ibarra.
Reacting to Biden’s act of supposed heresy, Reuters reporter Nandita Bose confronted Biden the day after his address. As he was boarding a plane, she asked Biden if he regretted using the term “illegal” to refer to immigrants – which he had not done in the speech.
Appeared flustered at the question, Biden said Riley’s alleged killer was “technically not supposed to be here.”
His unscripted answer to Bose is technically true, because Riley would still be alive if Ibarra had been deported, but it was not the answer the Far Left was demanding from Biden.
A day later, in a taped appearance on MSNBC, Biden was better prepared for a reporter’s attempt to squeeze an apology from him.
“I shouldn’t have used illegal,” Biden told MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart. “It’s undocumented.”
“So you-you regret using that word?" Capehart pressed.
“Yes,” Biden replied.
Later, in another segment on MSNBC, Capehart seemed to take a victory lap for correcting the President of the United States.
"[Biden] understood the damage that he caused," Capeheart said of that interview, "and he was very eager to make amends."
Despite that exchange, a White House spokesperson said Biden had not apologized.
“The president absolutely did not apologize,” Olivia Dalton, a White House spokesperson, told a reporter Monday. “There was no apology anywhere in that conversation. He did not apologize. He used a different word.”
“It sounded like [Biden] said I was wrong for using it, which is kind of an apology,” Mehlman observes. “So you could pick at it endlessly: the distinction between a regret and an apology. I think it's kind of a pointless discussion.”
