Trump to order English the official US language. Florida already did

President Donald Trump plans to issue an executive order making English the official language of the United States for the first time in the nation's nearly 250-year history, according to a White House official.

The order would rescind former President Bill Clinton’s August 2000 executive order requiring agencies and other recipients of federal funds to provide services for those with limited English proficiency.

However, federal departments and agencies would still be permitted to provide documents and services in other languages 'to best serve the American people and fulfill their agency mission," the summary says. A fact sheet shared with CNBC says the order "encourages new Americans to adopt a national language that opens doors to greater opportunities."

Trump has moved aggressively in the first five weeks of his second term to crack down on immigration, which over the past half-century has brought people from around the world who speak hundreds of languages.

“We have languages coming into our country. We don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language,” Trump said last year. “These are languages ‒ it’s the craziest thing ‒ they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing."

Soon after Trump's inauguration in January, a Spanish language version of the White House website and its Spanish X account, @LaCasaBlanca, was deleted. An archived version can be seen here.

Currently 31 U.S. states and five American territories, including Florida, already declare English is the official language, although some, such as Alaska, Hawaii and South Dakota, also recognize local indigenous languages.

"English is the official language of the State of Florida," the state constitution clearly states. "The legislature shall have the power to enforce this section by appropriate legislation."

It was added in 1988 when voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment known as Measure 11, put forward after hundreds of thousands of refugees from Cuba, Haiti and Central America fled their homelands and settled into South Florida, especially in Dade County.

The sheer number of immigrants living in the same areas meant that the usual process of gradual assimilation into American life wasn't happening.

"Rather than accommodating the melting-pot theory, Cubans had become a culturally, economically, and politically distinct presence," Donna M. Greenspan wrote for the Nova Law Review in 1994. "As the Cuban influence grew, non-Hispanic whites felt increasingly alienated from their Hispanic neighbors and threatened with the loss of the community they had known."

Miami-Dade County, then called Dade County, issued an English-only ordinance in 1980 prohibiting county officials from using any language but English, and from fostering any culture other than that of the United States.

In early 1985, a group called Florida English kicked off a controversial campaign for a constitutional amendment, which was hotly debated by groups calling it bigoted, xenophobic, and a danger to tourism and foreign investment. A memo from the founder of the national group, U.S. English, warning that "Hispanics are both fertile and corrupt" and a threat to the United States caused a backlash and accusations of racism, and there were several legal challenges, but the amendment passed with 84% of the vote.

Florida continues to offer Spanish versions of government documents and voting ballots.

Joey Garrison, USA TODAY, contributed to this story.

(This story was updated to add new information.)