In the wake of a strong government response to the Los Angeles protests, more attention has gone this week to how a word like “invasion” functions — leading the machinery of government in one direction, and not another.
Yet whether or not the U.S. has experienced an immigrant “invasion” and whether or not President Donald Trump is on the path to becoming a “dictator” are national conversations that rely upon more than just objective facts on the ground.
They also depend on how people across the political spectrum define either term — which have become surprisingly contested in our strongly polarized U.S. landscape.
But even when diverse Americans reach different conclusions — including the president and his political opponents — there are systems and processes in place within our democratic system that provide some stabilizing checks.
Invasion or not?
On Monday, U.S. District Judge David Briones blocked the Trump administration from deporting migrants in Texas without a court hearing, granting a request for a permanent injunction barring the government from flying to El Salvador Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members, without first receiving a chance to defend themselves.
Earlier this spring, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act for the first time since World War II, a 1798 law meant to protect the early republic against feared sedition from France. That proclamation gave him new powers to summarily expel individuals from any nation that has “perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States” an “invasion or predatory incursion.”
That word “invasion” is something presidential adviser Stephen Miller has used over and over and over and over to describe recent events in LA, as Washington Post columnist Phillip Bump pointed out.
And the president wrote on social media as well, “A once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals.” He promised the federal government would “take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots. Order will be restored, the Illegals will be expelled, and Los Angeles will be set free.”
In a lengthy order, Briones stated that under the law, “a president cannot unilaterally define what constitutes an invasion, summarily declare that a foreign nation or government has threatened or perpetrated an invasion or predatory incursion of the United States, identify alien enemies subject to detention or removal, and summarily remove them.”
As Charles P. Pierce put it more brusquely at Esquire, “It’s not an invasion just because Trump and Stephen Miller say so.”
Briones went on to argue that the terms “invasion” and “predatory incursion,” as used in early law, require a “militarized effort against, and militarized intrusion into, the territory of the United States with the specific purpose of conquering or obtaining control over territory.”
While the classic definitions of “invasion” in the Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries specify an “armed force” and an “incursion of an army for conquest or plunder,” both dictionaries also list a second, more generalized definition that has no such qualifier — calling invasion in the first, “an incursion by a large number of people or things into a place or sphere of activity” and in the second, “the incoming or spread of something usually hurtful.”
So much depends on what we decide a word like this means. After all, if the nation truly is under threat of invasion (or “insurrection,” which Aaron Blake notes is another word being used more frequently), then detention without due process and a militarized response to protests may well be justified. Yet under the narrower definition of invasion, it’s hard to make the legal case for these actions, despite widespread acknowledgement that illegal border crossings under the prior administration were hugely problematic.
Judges across the nation have been advocating for the more precise definition of “invasion.” In terms of the 1798 act, for instance, the Texas judge pushed back on the administration’s efforts to “broaden the meaning of these terms,” arguing that the declaration of facts provided by the White House “does not rise to meet the plain, ordinary meanings of the statutory terms.”
The centuries-old act was “clearly not meant to be all-encompassing,” Briones went on to say. “As such, this Court declines to stretch the AEA’s meaning so broadly that mass migration or criminal activities by some members of a particular nationality could qualify as an ‘invasion,’ and virtually any group, hailing from virtually any country, could be deemed alien enemies.”
Dictator or not?
A similar expansiveness shows up in left-leaning language fears about the president’s actions being deemed as “authoritarian,” “autocratic” or even “dictatorial.”
Yet these growing references to a strong-man “dictator” likewise fail to meet the “plain, ordinary meaning” of the word per Merriam-Webster (“one holding complete autocratic control” or “unlimited governmental power”). These usages likewise reflect an excessive broadening of the term.
John Gable, CEO of AllSides.com, a news site dedicated to promoting cross-partisan understanding, tells Deseret News, “what something factually means is often not the most important thing — what it means to real people is what matters most.”
For instance, he says, “do people feel threatened by such large numbers immigrating illegally, and not documented? Perhaps they feel that they are being ignored and insulted by being told, once again, to ignore hundreds of thousands of people moving into their country, maybe even their neighborhoods, outside of the legal process.”
Similarly, those using the term “dictator” may signal a genuine fear of the direction this president is taking the country. Regardless of whether the technical definition applies, that stronger language simply reflects their own stronger feelings.
These competing meanings of the same words, therefore, reflect different genuine fears people hold, Gable explains. He and other experts believe this kind of appreciation is crucial to finding deeper understanding.
“There are fair and legal questions about government authority and due process,” Gable acknowledges. “There are also fair and legitimate questions about whether the greater danger is from the protestors and rioters destroying property, or from potential escalation due to additional, federal law enforcement.”
Instead of simply debating the final definition of words like dictator, invasion, insurrection, constitutional or hundreds of other hot-button terms, we could instead ask a simple question: “What does that word mean to you?” This can spark a conversation that deepens understanding.
More broadly, it seems clear these distinctions in meaning are anything but a subjective, linguistic exercise. As witnessed in Los Angeles this week — and in the deportations happening across the country — the specific meaning of words has real-life consequences.