When you walk into any major American city’s Social Security office on a weekday morning, you’ll see the same scene: rows of plastic chairs full of people holding folders of documents, some whispering in Spanish, Cantonese, or Haitian Creole, others attempting to read forms in a language they’ve been learning for three years but haven’t yet mastered. Federal law mandated that the government assist those individuals for many years. A phone line, a multilingual form, a translator—something. This obligation is currently in legal limbo, and the dispute over what will happen next is more intricate and significant than much of the media portrays.
Signed earlier this year, Executive Order 14224 declares English to be the official national language of the United States and repeals Executive Order 13166, which was issued in 2000 and mandated that federal agencies give meaningful language access to the approximately 25 million Americans who were deemed to have limited English proficiency.
The new directive states that agencies are not obliged to stop providing multilingual services right away. However, that hedge hasn’t done much to clear up the confusion. Some organizations have discreetly kept up their translation services. Some have started to phase them out. Currently, the outcome is a patchwork of access that varies based on which government facility you happen to enter. It’s not a policy. Millions of individual encounters could result in that kind of mishap.
This battle is fascinating to watch in part because the constitutional landscape is actually ambiguous. The Civil Rights Act of 1964’s Title VI forbids discrimination on the basis of national origin, and courts have spent decades proving that punishing someone for having poor English proficiency serves as a stand-in for national origin discrimination, which is unlawful.
An executive order does not negate that legal principle. Civil rights organizations like the Asian Law Caucus, CRLA, and LAFLA, which are keeping a close eye on federal agencies and getting ready to contest what they perceive to be unlawful rollbacks, continue to highlight it. Whether the injunction itself will withstand ongoing judicial scrutiny or if it was always more symbolic than enforceable is still up for debate.
However, symbols have a way of becoming policy when no one is paying close attention, so it is important to take the symbolic dimension seriously. Over the years, over thirty states have enacted their own English-only laws, and state courts have debated the laws’ validity with varying degrees of success. While some sections have been upheld, others have been overturned.
Legal observers believe that the real battles will be fought in dozens of smaller cases—a healthcare intake form denied here, a tax filing assistance office closed there—quietly building up into something larger. The federal order adds a new layer to that already patchwork.
Whether this is a significant change in the way the government handles its non-English-speaking citizens or a legal document with more political weight than practical effect is a truly challenging question. Despite several attempts over the years, the United States has never established an official language by an Act of Congress. That is still the case. The order’s signal to states, agencies, and individuals waiting in those plastic chairs with their documents in hand, wondering if the translator will still be there next month, has changed.
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