WASHINGTON -- As the heated debates over health care and immigration reform collide, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists has called on the nation’s news media to stop using the term "illegals" as a noun to refer to undocumented immigrants.

NAHJ has long advocated for accurate terminology in news coverage of immigration. NAHJ is concerned with the increasing use of pejorative terms like "illegals" -- which is shorthand for "illegal aliens," another term NAHJ objects to using -- to describe the estimated 12 million undocumented people living in the United States.

"Using 'illegals' in this way is grammatically incorrect and crosses the line by dehumanizing and criminalizing the person, not the action they are purported to have committed," a news release from the organization said. NAHJ called on the media to never use "illegals" in headlines and in television news crawls.

"We continue to see 'illegals’ used as a noun seeping from the fringes into the mainstream media, and in turn, into the mainstream political dialogue," said NAHJ Executive Director Iván Román. "Using these terms not only distorts the debate, but it takes away their identities as individuals and human beings. When journalists do that, it’s that much easier to treat them unfairly and not give them an equal voice in the controversy."

Immigration law in the United States is a civil/administrative matter -- not criminal. It is not a "crime" to be in the United States without proper documentation. An individual, who is in the United States without appropriate documentation, is subject to being detained and, after an administrative hearing, may be deported.

"By incessantly using metaphors like 'illegals,' the news media is not only appropriating the rhetoric used by people on a particular side of the issue, but also the implication of something criminal or worthy of suspicion," the news release stated. "That helps to predetermine the credibility or respect given to one of the protagonists of this debate, which is not conducive to good journalism and does a disservice to the principles of fairness and neutrality."

The national organization has always denounced the use of the terms "alien" and "illegal alien" to describe undocumented immigrants because it says it casts them as adverse, strange beings, inhuman outsiders who come to the U.S. with questionable motivations. "Aliens" is a bureaucratic term that should be avoided unless used in a quote, the organization advised.

NAHJ also called on editors and journalists to follow generally accepted guidelines regarding race and ethnicity and refrain from reporting a person’s legal status unless it is relevant to the story in question. The public in certain regions of the country have pressured news media to publish the legal status of any Latino who appears in the newspaper or on television, regardless of the story’s subject.

"Doing so contributes to the growing trend of profiling Latinos as non-Americans or foreigners and using them as scapegoats for a variety of society’s ills, a tone that has become more pervasive in the public dialogue over the past few years," said the NAHJ. "Few now doubt that this helps create a fertile environment for hate speech which we have seen can lead to discrimination and a growing number of hate crimes in the U.S. against Latinos."

As the U.S. tackles immigration reform in the future, NAHJ said it believes that responsible, fair, and non-simplistic coverage of this complex issue is in order.