Trump’s new ‘Aliens’ website exploits UFO intrigue to demean immigrants

(CNN) — When the Trump administration registered the domains Aliens.gov and Alien.gov in March, UFO conspiracy theorists wondered whether they might finally get answers they’d long awaited.

But coming on the heels of the Pentagon’s anticlimactic release of files related to UFOs and extraterrestrial life, the debut of Aliens.gov last week proved even more disappointing: The website was no “Disclosure Day,” but a parody, serving no apparent purpose but to disparage undocumented immigrants.

“THEY WALK AMONG US,” the site declares in large, neon green text. Crawling type then starts to fill the screen: “For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret. Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives.”

Along with fake “declassified” labels and a clunky reference to “The X-Files,” the website also features an interactive map tracking “alien encounters,” or purported arrests of immigrants, and asks users to report “suspicious aliens.”

In announcing the new site on X, the White House also posted an AI-generated animation depicting a UFO beaming up an undocumented immigrant over the southern border wall. It’s not the first time Trump and his administration have engaged in wordplay around “aliens:” The president recently shared an AI-generated image showing him walking alongside a chiseled alien in shackles.

Long before “alien” conjured images of otherworldly beings, the word was used to denote something other, strange or foreign to one’s own sphere. “Alien” entered into English from Latin and French around the 14th century and over the years took on a specific legal meaning. Black’s Law Dictionary defines an alien as “a person who resides within the borders of a country but is not a citizen or subject of that country.”

Other forms of “alien” convey key dimensions of the human experience — to feel “alienated” is to experience a sense of loneliness and nonbelonging; a spouse who claims a third party has damaged their marriage can sue them for “alienation of affections.” But on the Trump administration’s new website, “alien” is used to mean inhuman: “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences. With one exception — they do not belong here.”

In US jurisprudence, “alien” appears in the nation’s first immigration law, the Naturalization Act of 1790, which stipulated that “any Alien being a free white person” of good character and who has lived in the US for at least two years could become a citizen. The word also figured heavily in the Alien and Sedition Acts, a set of four 18th century laws that restricted citizenship, expanded the president’s authority to detain and deport foreigners, and criminalized dissenting speech. (Trump continues to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, against Venezuelan men.)

In early US history, “alien” functioned largely as a bureaucratic term. Around the 1940s, the word began to shift into general use in reference to Mexican laborers on temporary US visas, says Michael Lechuga, a University of New Mexico professor and author of “Visions of Invasion: Alien Affects, Cinema, and Citizenship in Settler Colonies.” He says some workers discovered upon arriving that the farms or companies where they’d been contracted to work had already met their quotas.

As a result, he says those workers were deemed “illegal aliens,” stripped of their papers and marked for deportation. “The term really did come about in this enforcement around laws that were around one’s status as a laborer, but also really out of their control,” he adds.

The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which replaced national origin quotas with a system that prioritized skilled labor, further popularized the term, says historian Mai Ngai, author of “Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.” Though the law ushered in a wave of both authorized and unauthorized immigration from Mexico, the “illegal alien” label took hold.

When George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan were asked in a 1980 presidential debate about whether children of “illegal aliens” should be entitled to free public education, both candidates used the term in their answers, even while calling for amnesty and broader pathways to legalization. Bill Clinton also referred to “illegal aliens” numerous times in his 1995 State of Union address.

“By the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, racism against Mexicans was all couched in this assumption that all Mexicans were illegal, which has never been true,” she says.

Space “aliens,” meanwhile, were an invention of 20th century science fiction. The Oxford English Dictionary cites early examples from the pulp magazine “Wonder Stories” around the 1930s, and by the Space Age the term was widespread. Crucially, Ngai says, the term for extraterrestrials flowed from the word for foreigners, not the other way around. “When people spoke of beings from outer space, they likened them to foreigners,” she says. “It’s not like people saw an immigrant and said they look like they’re from outer space. They saw an image of a being from outer space and said they look like a foreigner.”

The Trump administration casting immigrants as extraterrestrials, then, isn’t particularly novel. Sci-fi stories about alien invasions have often functioned as political allegories for anxieties around empire and immigration, Lechuga says. Take H.G. Wells’ quintessential alien invasion novel “The War of the Worlds.” By one account, Lechuga explains, Wells said his depiction of Martians invading Victorian England was inspired by European colonization of the Aboriginal Tasmanians; by another, the author billed it as a warning about the need to strengthen England’s military capabilities. Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film adaptation of “The War of the Worlds,” set in a post-9/11 landscape, is alternately understood by viewers as being about American fears of terrorism and about the US invasion of Iraq.

“What the White House did was an ultimate association of immigrants with not being human,” Ngai says. “To say that they came from a spaceship means they’re not human beings.”

Use of the term has political implications, too. The legal scholar Keith Cunningham found that US Supreme Court opinions that used language such as “aliens” were more likely to deliver unfavorable outcomes for immigrants, and proposed that judges use words such as “migrants”.

Over the years, as immigrant rights advocates sought to eliminate “alien” from the lexicon, it seemed that mainstream language around immigrants and asylum-seekers was shifting. People and institutions swapped “undocumented” for “illegal,” and “non-citizen” and “immigrant” for “alien.” California struck “alien” from its labor code in 2015; states including Oregon, Colorado and Washington have since taken similar measures. In 2021, President Joe Biden issued a memo directing the nation’s immigration enforcement agencies to use “non-citizen” and “migrant” in place of “alien” and “illegal aliens.” A commentary in The Guardian that same year referred to the phrase “illegal aliens” as “now-defunct.”

The White House defended its use of the term. “Identifying an individual as an ‘illegal alien,’ is not demeaning, it’s factual,” spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “The Trump Administration will continue deporting illegal aliens without apology.”

Jose Antonio Vargas, a journalist who was brought to the US without authorization as a child, recalls seeing the words “resident alien” stamped on his forged green card and thinking it sounded like something out of a video game. “That term ‘alien’ strips people really of personhood, making people easier to villainize,” he says. “How do you legalize people you call ‘illegal’ or ‘alien’? You don’t. You just call them ‘illegal’ or ‘alien.’”

The Trump administration takes that outlook to the point of using nonhuman pronouns to refer to immigrants: “If you’ve witnessed an Alien abduction, do not be alarmed. The Alien is in good hands,” the website reads. “We will take care of it… and return it safely to its place of origin.”

CNN’s Catherine Shoichet contributed to this report.

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