The fight over “illegal alien” versus “undocumented immigrant” is almost never really about grammar — it is a proxy war over whether unauthorized presence in the United States is best understood as a legal violation, a civil technicality, or a matter of human dignity that language should not pre-judge, and nobody wins that argument by shouting a label across a cable-news desk.
Key Points
- A December 30, 2025 CNN exchange between commentator Scott Jennings and former MS NOW host Tiffany Cross reignited the decades-old dispute over “illegal alien” as a term for people in the country without authorization
- Federal glossaries and statutes still use “alien” and in some cases define “illegal alien” explicitly, giving Jennings genuine legal-document grounding for his usage
- Major journalism style authorities — the AP Stylebook, USA TODAY Network, and diversity-focused guides — explicitly instruct against the phrase, preferring “undocumented”
- The term’s dominance is historically recent, not a timeless legal fixture: usage spiked after the late 1960s and peaked around California’s 1994 Proposition 187 fight, replacing earlier labels like “wetback”
- The deeper disagreement concerns whether a person can be “illegal” at all, or only conduct can be — a distinction with real consequences for how audiences perceive civil versus criminal status
What Actually Happened On Air
The segment that generated the headlines was unremarkable in form but combustible in substance: Jennings asked Cross directly whether a particular noncitizen was “an illegal alien,” pressing her twice when she deflected. Cross’s reply was unambiguous. “I don’t call people illegal aliens. I think that’s a slur,” she said, before pivoting to “People aren’t illegal. So, undocumented—” and challenging whether anyone could apply the label to a person who “doesn’t have the opportunity to fight, to have due process”. That is the entire factual record of the exchange as reported — a live disagreement over vocabulary, not a dispute over an underlying case file, arrest record, or immigration-court order. No transcript detail from either side supplies the adjudicated status of the person being discussed, which matters because the term’s accuracy, in any individual case, ultimately depends on facts neither debater put on the table.
The Legal-Document Case For The Term
Jennings’s position is not invented from nothing. The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services’ glossary of noncitizen terms — built from federal sourcing — defines “Illegal Alien” plainly as a foreign national who entered without inspection, used fraudulent documents, or overstayed a nonimmigrant status. USCIS’s own glossary still treats “alien” as a functioning legal category, synonymous with “foreign national” and rooted in the Immigration and Nationality Act’s definition of a person who is not a U.S. citizen or national. The AP Stylebook even concedes a narrower version of the argument, allowing that “illegal” can properly modify an action — illegal entry, illegal residence — rather than condemning the underlying legal concept outright. On paper, then, there is a defensible technical foundation: unauthorized entry or overstay is a genuine violation of immigration law, and describing that violation in plain terms is not, by itself, an invention of the political right.
Where The Term Breaks Down
The trouble is that “illegal alien” collapses two distinct things into one phrase: a person’s legal status and the conduct that produced it. The AP Stylebook makes this distinction explicit, instructing journalists to reserve “illegal” for an action and to avoid “illegal alien” outside direct quotation entirely. The Cincinnati Enquirer’s published standards go further, noting that crossing a border without authorization can be illegal conduct, but remaining after a legal entry without proper paperwork is typically a civil violation, not a crime — a distinction PBS’s reporting on ICE enforcement makes in similar terms. That civil-versus-criminal line is precisely what gets erased when a television exchange reduces to “is he an illegal alien or not,” because the binary format rewards a yes-or-no answer the underlying law frequently does not provide, especially for people with pending asylum claims, temporary protected status, or unresolved removal proceedings.
Cross’s due-process objection, in other words, is not merely rhetorical deflection — it tracks a genuine legal gap between accusation and adjudication. A person can be present without current authorization and still have a live, unresolved claim to lawful status; calling that person “illegal” as a settled fact forecloses a legal question that, in many cases, a judge has not yet answered. That is the strongest plank in the counter-case, and it is backed by more than advocacy sentiment: diversity-style guidance, mainstream newsroom standards, and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists have converged on the same civil-violation framing for over a decade.
A Term With A Traceable History, Not A Timeless Pedigree
Neither side is arguing from bedrock tradition. Legal historian Gerald Neuman’s research found no use of “illegal” in American judicial immigration decisions before 1950; the phrase’s prominence rose sharply after the late 1960s and crested during California’s 1994 Proposition 187 campaign, according to sociologist Edwin Ackerman’s analysis. Before “illegal alien” took hold in major newspapers, the dominant term was “wetback,” itself a replacement for still earlier labels. That lineage matters: it shows the language has shifted repeatedly alongside policy fights, racial politics, and partisan competition, not settled once and for all by statute. Pew Research separately documented that “illegal alien” usage in news coverage had declined substantially by 2013, overtaken by “undocumented” and “unauthorized,” a trend newsroom style guides have only formalized since.
What The Dispute Actually Settles
Strip away the cable-news theater and the honest conclusion is this: “illegal alien” retains a narrow, technical accuracy when applied to someone whose unlawful entry or overstay has been formally established, because federal glossaries and statute still use the underlying legal category. But as a general-purpose label for people whose status is contested, unadjudicated, or in process, the term overreaches — collapsing conduct and identity, criminal and civil, in a way nearly every major journalistic style authority now rejects. Jennings’s terminology survives scrutiny only when tethered to a confirmed legal finding; divorced from that finding, it functions less as description and more as verdict, which is exactly the objection Cross raised on air. The underlying immigration-status question for any individual case remains, as it almost always does, a matter for courts and agencies to resolve — not a television exchange.
Sources:
twitchy.com, uscis.gov, pbs.org, apstylebook.com