The Justice Department announced Monday that it will be leading a multiagency initiative to slash an untold number of multilingual services in an effort it says is driven partly by a desire to force “assimilation.” This news comes as the Trump administration has been ramping up its efforts to make life for immigrants inconvenient — if not unbearable.
A DOJ memo says the department “will lead a coordinated effort to minimize non-essential multilingual services, redirect resources toward English-language education and assimilation, and ensure compliance with legal obligations through targeted measures where necessary.”
Donald Trump — who last year delivered a bigoted and idiotic tirade about “languages coming into our country” that “nobody in this country has ever heard of” — recently signed an executive order designating English as the country’s official language. The DOJ says it’s now carrying out that order’s directives, claiming that multilingualism policies can “impede assimilation and strain resources.”
I’ll note here that the Trump administration recently withheld billions of dollars in grants for K-12 programs — grants that in some cases were funding programs that help people learn English, in a move that I argued undercut the president’s stated goal of promoting English proficiency.
In reality, there’s ample reason to believe multilingual services benefit U.S. residents and the federal agencies that exist to serve them.
That’s partly why the DOJ’s memo seems like little more than an effort to undermine immigrants’ access to government services. In April, NBC News reported that the Trump administration has taken all sorts of steps to make life difficult for immigrants — and not just undocumented ones — and the assault on multilingual initiatives appears to be an extension of those efforts.
In reality, there’s ample reason to believe multilingual services benefit U.S. residents and the federal agencies that exist to serve them. In fact, the federal government’s own website for information on programs for people with limited English proficiency, LEP.gov, even includes a report detailing how multilingual services help law enforcement officials — such as at the Justice Department — overcome language barriers that can impede their work.
Given this, it should come as no surprise that the DOJ says it will “temporarily suspend operations of LEP.gov and all other public-facing materials related to language access for individuals with LEP, including Letters, Internet posts, YouTube videos, and training materials, pending an internal review.”