After she was abducted by ICE, her RCT interpreter helped secure her release
During the July 4 “holiday” of this year of 2025, a cherished member of the RCT community, someone for whom I have interpreted for a long time, was abducted by ICE.
They arrested her at a routine asylum court hearing. There were no legal grounds for her arrest. The judge had not dismissed her case, and yet masked ICE agents were waiting outside the courtroom to violently tear her away from me, her interpreter, and her other loved ones.
That day she was forced to sign documents she didn’t understand, which were later used to justify ICE’s decision to transfer her in shackles four hours a way to a prison in a remote city where she has no one.
In spite of her right to have an interpreter present at all times, they separated the two of us and forced her to sign away her rights in a language unknown to her.
That same day we — a team of her loved ones, accompaniment volunteers from Respond Crisis Translation, and an attorney from Centro Legal de la Raza — sprinted rapidly to draft and file a writ of habeas corpus.
The next evening, on July 4th, a federal judge ordered her to be freed, and she was home by Sunday evening, a miraculous victory over the clutches of the ICE kidnapping regime.
This story is one of countless. It is a reminder that as language workers, we are called to play a critical role during these times. If I hadn't been there, there wouldn't have been a witness or interventionist, and we would not have been able to succeed in filing the petition to secure her release.
If you are a language worker, know that the RCT team is here to support and train you so that you feel prepared to work on the frontlines of the fight against the anti-migrant tyranny.
And if you are a supporter or someone with resources, please know that supporting legal aid organizations is important but not enough. The legal aid organizations are at capacity and language workers are stepping in, often as the only person present during asylum interviews and therefore the first and only line of defense for migrants vulnerable to experiencing detention, deportation, and other abuses.
So, fund language work. Fund RCT. Support our work, because over 200 languages are spoken by the communities being targeted by the cruel policies designed to dismantle access to asylum.
Without language workers, migrants face unspeakable risk of being disappeared into a communicative abyss. Interpreters and translators on our team are working around the clock to ensure that people impacted by the cruelty can communicate, using their voices to exercise their rights as they navigate the racist bureaucracy designed to extinguish hope and cage asylum seekers into a dystopian labyrinth of physical and linguistic entrapment.
Language workers are essential. Language workers are fighting back.
