{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://rubengallego.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congressman-ruben-gallego-co-sponsors-legislation-change-term-alien", "Congressman Ruben Gallego Co-Sponsors Legislation to Change the Term Alien in Federal Law", "2015-10-23", "2015", "2015-10", "Democrat", "House", "AZ", "Ruben Gallego", "G000574", "rubengallego.house.gov", null, null, "legacy", "Washington, DC  Congressman Ruben Gallego signed up as a co-sponsor to H.R. 3785, a bill introduced by Congressman Joaquin Castro (D-TX) that would remove the offensive and arcane language characterizing immigrants as aliens from federal law and agency documentation.\nThe Correcting Hurtful and Alienating Names in Government Expression (CHANGE) Act would strike all instances of the word alien from the U.S. code and replace it with foreign national. The term illegal alien would be replaced with the term undocumented foreign national. The bill would also prohibit executive agencies from using alien or illegal alien in any signage or literature.\nCongressman Ruben Gallego released the following statement:\nWords matter. The term alien is dehumanizing and offensive, and contributes to the prejudice and xenophobia that have become a too-familiar part of the national conversation on immigration.\nImmigrants, with or without status, are human beings and deserve to be treated with respect. The CHANGE Act will take a long overdue step in acknowledging this simple fact, and I hope it will help to change the dialogue as we move forward with efforts to fix our nations broken immigration system.\n\n\n##", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://rubengallego.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congressman-ruben-gallego-co-sponsors-legislation-change-term-alien"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.8728350512683392, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}