When the Trump administration registered the Aliens.gov and Alien.gov domains in March 2026, UFO conspiracy theorists eagerly awaited revelations. The expectation was that they would finally get the answers they were looking for about extraterrestrial life.
However, the debut of Aliens.gov last week, on the heels of an unexciting release of Pentagon files on UFOs and life beyond Earth, proved even more disheartening. The portal was not a “Revelation Day”, but rather a satire, whose only apparent purpose was to denigrate undocumented immigrants.
“THEY WALK AMONG US,” the site announces in large, neon green letters, before text scrolls across the screen, stating: “For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret. Extraterrestrials have walked among us, living in our neighborhoods and interacting with us in our everyday lives.”
Accompanying false “declassified” labels and a somewhat clumsy allusion to “The
The White House, when releasing the new website on platform X, published an animation created by artificial intelligence, which portrayed a UFO abducting an undocumented immigrant over the wall on the southern border. This is not the first time that Trump and his administration have used wordplay with the term “alien”; the former president recently shared an image generated by artificial intelligence in which he appeared walking alongside a muscular, chained alien.
Long before the word “alien” evoked beings from another world, it was used to indicate something distinct, strange, or outside one’s own sphere. The term “alien” arrived in the English language, coming from Latin and French, around the 14th century, and over time, it acquired 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.”
More on this story: Demonstration by supremacists in the USA on a national holiday provokes political reaction
Other nuances of the term “alien” express crucial aspects of the human experience, such as the feeling of “alienation”, which denotes isolation and lack of belonging; or the “alienation of affection” process, in which a spouse accuses a third person of harming their marriage. However, the Trump administration’s new website uses “alien” to mean inhumane: “They shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human lives. With one exception, they do not belong here.”
In United States jurisprudence, the word “alien” appears in the country’s first immigration law, the Naturalization Act of 1790, which established that “any alien who was a free white person”, of good conduct and resident in the USA for at least two years, could obtain citizenship. The term also featured prominently in the Alien and Sedition Acts, a set of four 18th-century statutes that limited citizenship, expanded presidential ability to detain and deport foreigners, and criminalized freedom of expression. Trump continues to refer to the Enemies Alien Act of 1798 against Venezuelan men.
In early American history, “alien” operated primarily as a bureaucratic term. Around the 1940s, the word began to be used widely to refer to Mexican workers on temporary visas in the US, explains Michael Lechuga, professor at the University of New Mexico and author of “Visions of Invasion: Alien Affects, Cinema, and Citizenship in Settler Colonies”.
He details that, in many cases, these workers discovered, upon arrival, that the farms or companies for which they had been hired had already filled their quotas. As a result, these individuals were categorized as “illegal aliens,” their documents were confiscated, and they were targeted for deportation. “The term actually arose due to the application of laws related to worker status, but which were actually beyond their control,” adds Lechuga.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which replaced nationality quotas with a system that favored skilled labor, further expanded the term’s popularity, says historian Mae Ngai, author of “Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.” Although the legislation spurred a wave of immigration, both legal and unauthorized, from Mexico, the “illegal alien”took hold.
On the same topic: Headlines that defy logic: a top 10 of the most bizarre news stories on the planet
During a presidential debate in 1980, when George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan were asked whether the children of “illegal immigrants” should be entitled to a free public education, both candidates used the term in their responses, even as they advocated amnesty and broader paths to legalization.
Similarly, Bill Clinton also used the expression “illegal immigrants” several times in his 1995 State of the Union address. Ngai points out that “in the late 1970s and early 1980s, racism against Mexicans was entirely based on the assumption that all Mexicans were illegals, which was never true.”
Simultaneously, space “aliens” emerged as a creation of 20th century science fiction. The Oxford English Dictionary points to early examples from the pulp magazine “Wonder Stories” around the 1930s, and by the Space Age the term was already widespread. Crucially, Ngai notes that the term for extraterrestrials derived from the word for aliens, not the other way around.
“When people talked about beings from outer space, they compared them to foreigners,” he says. “It’s not like people see an immigrant and say he looks like he’s from outer space. They see a picture of a being from outer space and say he looks like a foreigner.”
So the Trump administration’s perspective that immigrants are extraterrestrials is not exactly new. Science fiction stories about alien invasions often function as political allegories for concerns around imperialism and immigration, according to Lechuga.
He cites H.G. Wells’ classic alien invasion novel “The War of the Worlds.” One interpretation has Wells saying that his depiction of Martians invading Victorian England was inspired by the European colonization of Tasmanian Aborigines; another suggests that the author presented it as a warning of the need to strengthen English military capabilities. The 2005 film adaptation of “The War of the Worlds” by Steven Spielberg, set in the post-9/11 context, is seen by viewers as a reflection both on the fear of terrorism in the United States and on the US invasion of Iraq.
“What the White House did was associate immigrants with the idea that they are not human,” says Ngai. “To say they came from a spaceship means they are not human beings.”
Learn more: Trump issues passports; government is pushing for a US$250 bill with the president’s face, says newspaper
The use of the term also has political consequences. Legal scholar Keith Cunningham found that US Supreme Court decisions that used words like “alien” were more likely to produce unfavorable results for immigrants, proposing that judges use words like “migrants”.
Over the years, as immigrant rights advocates sought to eliminate the term “alien” from vocabulary, the prevailing language surrounding immigrants and asylum seekers seemed to be in flux. People and institutions replaced “illegal” with “undocumented” and “foreigner” with “non-citizen” and “immigrant”.
California removed “alien” from its labor code in 2015; states including Oregon, Colorado and Washington have since adopted similar measures. In 2021, President Joe Biden issued a memo directing the country’s immigration agencies to use “noncitizen” and “migrant” instead of “alien” and “illegal aliens.” An article in The Guardian that same year referred to the phrase “illegal aliens” as “now extinct”.
The White House, however, defended the use of the term. “Identifying an individual as an ‘illegal immigrant’ is not derogatory, it is factual,” spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “The Trump administration will continue to deport illegal immigrants without apology.”
José Antonio Vargas, a journalist who was brought to the US without authorization as a child, recalls seeing the words “foreign resident” printed on his counterfeit green card, and thinking it looked like something out of a video game. “This term ‘foreign’ really strips people of their humanity, making them easier to demonize,” he says. “How do you legalize people you call ‘illegals’ or ‘foreigners’? You don’t legalize them. You simply call them ‘illegals’ or ‘foreigners’.”
The Trump administration takes this approach to the point of employing non-human pronouns to refer to immigrants. The website states: “If you have witnessed an alien abduction, do not be alarmed. The alien is in good hands.”
