Copyright The New York Times
I speak Spanish with my mother, with other relatives, with old friends. I speak it with my children, though not as often as I should. I read novels in Spanish and listen to ’80s songs in Spanish. There are concepts and expressions that make sense to me only in Spanish. The language is my default setting for moments of alarm or stress; when I curse under my breath at some idiot driver, it is usually in Spanish. Sometimes, I even dream in Spanish. I just never dreamed that uttering the language out loud could render me a member of a suspect class. But now it does. Spanish has become a sanctioned indicator of potential criminality in the United States of America. The language of Miguel de Cervantes and Andrés Cantor, the world’s fourth most spoken tongue, has been deemed the sound of bad hombres in our midst. Courtesy of the Trump administration and a most accommodating Supreme Court, U.S. government agents are permitted to detain and question people about their immigration status based on a mix of four factors: their apparent race or ethnicity; their presence at a suspicious location, such as a particular bus stop or a day laborer site; the type of work they do; and whether they are speaking Spanish, or even just accented English. In July, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ordered federal agents operating in Los Angeles to stop detaining people based on those factors, concluding that the plaintiffs in the case were “likely to succeed in proving that the federal government is indeed conducting roving patrols without reasonable suspicion and denying access to lawyers,” in violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution. In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, rejected the government’s request for a stay of the lower court’s order. Last month, however, the Supreme Court obliged, pausing the order in an unsigned brief that did not specify its rationale or scope. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, lamenting that Fourth Amendment protections against arbitrary interference from law enforcement may no longer hold “for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little.” The court’s first Latina justice dissented, she explained, because she found the majority’s move “unconscionably irreconcilable with our nation’s constitutional guarantees.” Over the past several weeks, Americans have witnessed federal agents in major cities — notably, in Los Angeles and Chicago — detaining residents they suspect, often on unclear grounds, of being here illegally. I don’t know which videos are harder to watch: the shaky, damning recordings taken by passers-by on the street, or the slick, video-game-style productions from the Department of Homeland Security, militaristic propaganda for the war within. Yet the targeting of Spanish is about more than immigration. In this first year of the second Trump presidency, Americans have been engaged in a battle over freedom of expression, another constitutional guarantee that has fallen out of favor with the administration, which is eager to restrict, on political grounds, what we are allowed to say about certain issues or people. Now imagine that it is not just what you say that puts you at risk, but the very language in which you say it — or, really, the language in which you say anything at all. Speaking Spanish out loud in America today feels, bizarrely, like a transgressive act. When I speak it in public, a small part of me now wonders what people nearby might conclude about my “status,” based on nothing but my accent, my words, my sounds. Making language grounds for official suspicion is a particularly insidious suppression of speech, because it makes you question not just your ideas but your means of expressing them. Everything else about you is stripped away; you are a person who speaks Spanish, and that is all anyone needs to know. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the only member of the Supreme Court majority to write a concurrence to the September brief, argued that the four factors at issue can, in combination, “constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence.” It is, he wrote, “common sense,” appropriating one of President Trump’s favorite all-purpose justifications. Besides, Kavanaugh argued, “even if the government had a policy of making stops based on the factors prohibited by the District Court, immigration officers might not rely only on those factors if and when they stop plaintiffs in the future.” Linger on that line for a moment. By italicizing “only,” Kavanaugh implied that additional considerations could come into play when immigration agents choose to detain and question suspects. But, really, it is that first “if” and the “might” that do the heavy lifting in Kavanaugh’s sentence. Even if the government has that policy (he isn’t acknowledging it does) they still might (who knows?) rely on other factors, too. That’s a lot for Kavanaugh to rest upon conditionals and possibilities, especially when they can just as easily go the other way. Say, if an ICE agent gets within earshot of someone speaking Spanish — or simply less-than-fluent English — might the agent then suspect that person of being one of those murderers, rapists, gang members or other criminal immigrants from which the Department of Homeland Security claims to be defending us? I have at least reasonable suspicion that this can happen. Some critics of the administration now refer to the questioning of suspected illegal immigrants based on factors such as ethnicity or language as “Kavanaugh stops.” The associate justice is in fact quite right to imagine that other factors might come into play — except those other factors can be just as arbitrary. “Perhaps you look panicked when you see a Border Patrol agent,” Gregory Bovino, a high-ranking Border Patrol official involved in operations in Los Angeles and Chicago, recently told CNN. “Perhaps you look scared. Perhaps your demeanor changes. Perhaps you’re gripping the steering wheel so tightly that I can see the whites of your knuckles. There’s a myriad of factors that we would look at to develop articulable facts for reasonable suspicion.” But whose demeanor would not change if armed, masked agents descended upon their city, their workplace, their school, their street, their yard? Mine certainly would, no matter that I became a U.S. citizen more than a decade ago. (ProPublica has found more than 170 cases of U.S. citizens being detained by immigration agents, sometimes for days, during the first nine months of the Trump administration.) So I still might look panicked, scared or even angry. I still might grip my steering wheel more tightly, whether out of fear for myself or frustration for what my country is becoming. It’s just common sense. I first came to the United States from Peru as a kid in the 1970s, and I remember my mother’s excitement whenever we heard someone else speaking Spanish here. She always pointed the speakers out to me, and she usually found some excuse to make small talk with them, to learn where they came from. It became a habit of mine, too, after decades of living in the United States, even long after English had edged out Spanish as my dominant tongue. When I hear Spanish in the wild, I often try to detect its regional or national character, to pinpoint its rhythms on a mental atlas. I imagine the winding paths that the speakers, or their ancestors, might have taken to bring their language here, or to learn it here. My own version of Spanish had its own winding path. It includes the playful singsong tones of Arequipa, the city of my father’s family; the central Andes and southern Spain of my maternal forebears; and above all the voices, noises and slang of Lima, the capital city where I was born. Some native Spanish speakers in the United States have told me that living here for so long has modulated my Spanish, made it sound less specifically Peruvian, but every once in a while I run into someone from my home district — and when we hear each other, we both just know. There is, or there should be, a special pride that all Americans can take in the variety of languages spoken here. I love hearing different ones in big cities and small towns, inside airports and grocery stores, on television and radio, within sports stadiums and music halls, at bus stops and restaurants. This proliferation of voices is not a dilution of American greatness. To the contrary, every additional language I hear is an affirmation of America’s power and allure; it means one more person from one more place has wanted to make this place home. For this president and this administration, though, it signifies one more person who does not really belong. “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish,” Trump told Jeb Bush in a 2015 Republican debate, chastising the former Florida governor for daring to speak Spanish on the campaign trail. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump accused Democrats of importing immigrants illegally to vote in their favor. “They can’t even speak English,” he scoffed. And in an executive order in March declaring English the official language of the United States, the president stated that an English-speaking nation would “reinforce shared national values.” At the time of the order, I naïvely challenged Trump’s premise. After all, what are those shared American values, I argued, if not the self-evident truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence? “Political equality, natural rights and popular sovereignty can be expressed, upheld and lived out in any language,” I wrote in response to the executive order. “Trust me that fluency in Spanish does not stall the pursuit of happiness.” Except now it does. It’s harder to pursue happiness with ICE in pursuit. The Supreme Court and the administration have put the lie to the unifying justifications of Trump’s executive order. It is not about upholding English and shared values, but about denigrating Spanish and those who speak it. It is about turning Spanish into second-class speech, about making us wary of using it in public, about keeping us quiet and submissive. The Trump administration doesn’t like to see immigrants, or Spanish speakers, in the United States. (It doesn’t want many refugees, either, unless they are white and speak English and share the president’s aversion to mass migration and his taste for populism.) And it doesn’t like to communicate with Spanish speakers except on its own terms. The president who sat down for a friendly interview with Fox Noticias — “¿De dónde obtiene tanta energía?” was one hard-hitting question — is the same one who shut down the White House’s Spanish language website and social media accounts within hours of taking office. The official rejection of Spanish extends even to those speakers who are actively seeking to improve their English skills. The White House has proposed slashing the Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition, which according to the department’s site, exists to “help ensure that English learners and immigrant students attain English proficiency,” while at the same time “preserving heritage language and cultures.” This mission is too much for the White House to bear. In a May letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key player in developing the administration’s domestic agenda, explained the rationale for eliminating the office: “To end overreach from Washington and restore the rightful role of state oversight in education, the budget proposes to eliminate the misnamed English Language Acquisition program which actually de-emphasizes English primacy by funding NGOs and states to encourage bilingualism.” Encourage bilingualism? ¡Dios mío! Some 22 percent of people age 5 or older in the United States speak a language other than English at home, and among those, Spanish is the most common, according to the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey. Among those who speak a non-English language at home, however, the survey finds, more than 60 percent also speak English “very well.” The ability to understand more than one language is not a burden; it’s a gift. But the White House’s message is both clear and perverse: Your ability to speak another language is not an asset to the nation but a liability, and your effort to assimilate is proof that you don’t really belong. Even while the administration makes its disdain for Spanish speakers quite clear, the language remains the most widely taught second language in America’s public schools. Thousands of public and private schools offer Spanish instruction. Millions of Americans have taken Spanish classes. So maybe schools should just stop teaching Spanish altogether. Why spread the language, if it’s going to identify you as a potential lawbreaker? At the very least, schools should not teach it well because, the better your español, the more suspicious you’ll sound. This is the absurd logic that flows from the Trump administration’s actions. Of course, it is easier to deport a person than to dislodge a language. Like it or not, Spanish long ago crossed the border into English. In her recent study, “The Dynamic Lexicon of English,” Julia Landmann, a linguist, classifies the words that English has borrowed from other languages since the 19th century. It turns out that there is a bonanza of words with Spanish origins now found in the Oxford English Dictionary. A language is not incommunicado from the rest of the world. Think of languages as a cafeteria in which you can mix your servings; you don’t have to be a linguistics aficionado to understand this. No need to press el número dos or debate the Super Bowl halftime show. Spanish is already here. Obsessive state efforts at cultural protectionism betray a kind of national insecurity; if you feel you must build a wall around your language or your identity, you must not find them particularly robust. And such efforts can be self-defeating. After World War I, some American states barred the teaching of German from their schools. But instead of accelerating the assimilation of German immigrants, the policy had the opposite effect. Those affected were less likely to volunteer for the United States in World War II, more likely to marry within their own ethnic group, and even more inclined to choose overtly German names for their children. “Rather than facilitating the assimilation of immigrant children,” Vasiliki Fouka, a political scientist at Stanford, found, “the policy instigated a backlash, heightening the sense of cultural identity among the minority.” American identity is not threatened by the din of cultures and languages within its borders; it is defined by it. It is when we use that multiplicity to classify and ostracize that we weaken ourselves. An administration hellbent on eradicating identity politics is doing much to strengthen it. When my father was a recent immigrant to the United States, he spoke English haltingly but forcefully; it was almost an act of defiance toward anyone who might question his right to be here. Decades later, speaking Spanish in the United States feels the same way for me.
