The first sentence of that story says:

> New York City has banned the term "illegal alien" when used "with intent to demean, humiliate or harass a person," the city said.

That sounds like an important qualification, but I suspect in praxis intent is hard to (dis)prove so it would probably depend on the judge and precedents?

this only applies in workplaces, to landlords, or providers of public accommodations, and this only applies to harassment, its like saying hate crime legislation makes it illegal to be bigoted

whenever something sounds this absurd, read past the headline and you usually find whats actually going on is a lot more reasonable