Agents within U.S. Customers and Border Protection (CBP) are prohibited from using traditional gender pronouns during initial engagements with members of the public, according to an internal government memo recently obtained by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation.
The memo, requested via FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) by Heritage’s Oversight Project, ordered agents to avoid using “he, him, she, her” pronouns “until you have more information about, or provided by, the individual,” Fox News reports.
CBP, an entity of the Department of Homeland Security, told agents that “if an incorrect pronoun is used and corrected by the individual, acknowledge the oversight and use the correct pronoun,” Fox noted.
Heritage launched its Oversight Project in January 2022 to increase “aggressive oversight of the Biden administration and the political and corporate enablers of the leftist regime,” its press release stated. The project is led by attorney Mike Howell and former FBI investigator Mark Morgan.
Howell blasted the CBP memo as “a forced-speech program to call illegal aliens by their preferred pronouns,” per his interview with Fox, adding that CBP “should be allowed to do their job and prevent all illegal immigration, not used as pawns in some sick social experiment.”
During several posts on X, the Oversight Project displayed a portion of the CBP memo including its introduction which “provides guidance to all CBP employees” for “effective communication with the diverse public we serve.”
CBP did not respond to multiple requests for comment, Fox noted.
Conservative commentators slammed the border patrol guidance, including Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk who called the memo “an utter disgrace.”
Republican Montana Congressman Matt Rosendale said he’s “more concerned with who is coming into our country illegally and where they are from than whether ‘she’ wants to be called a ‘he!’”
“At the border, only two terms count: citizen or illegal,” he added.