Unlawful arrest of Chinese asylum seeker forced to rely on Google Translate in SF court
A dystopian scene unfolded in the SF immigration court this past week: a Mandarin-speaking man was unlawfully abducted by ICE, and was alerted to his fate through a machine translator. No one present in the courtroom could speak Mandarin–the most common first language on the planet. The presiding judge turned to the Department of Homeland Security’s attorney to decide on a life and death matter. As reported in Mission Local, when the state moved to dismiss the case, the judge sighed.
Since the attorneys can’t communicate with you,” O’Brien said, “I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen.
The judge proceeded to explain that the asylum seeker would be arrested. In the absence of an interpreter, he used machine translation to explain to the man what would take place next. Meanwhile, a volunteer attorney and court observer from Faith in Action gathered the information of this asylum seeker, in hopes that an appeal can be entered on his behalf.
The government is deploying language deprivation as a key weapon in its war on migrants. People seeking asylum are being delivered to a deadly system of incarceration without the chance to communicate to the judge, or even their own attorneys: this is a violation of the constitutional and fundamental right to language access.
As reported in Mission Local, this young man was the fifth person arrested at the court that day. This process has now become routine: migrants unlawfully delivered to a web of brutal detention facilities, deprived of access to loved ones and resources such as legal support, basic nutrition, and healthcare. In this terrifying “new normal,” judges, attorneys, and even ICE agents–one of whom, in this case, did speak Mandarin–all collude in a state process for the dehumanization, abduction, incarceration and potential deportation of people seeking safety from specific threats to their lives.
Language work is overlooked and grossly underfunded even in advocacy contexts. The impact of this erasure is far-reaching and deadly. Language justice practitioners are often the only people present who can offer trauma-informed accompaniment and clear information for migrants under state attack.
