In Case You Missed It: Respond Crisis Translation’s Language Justice Forum
ICE raids, detention, deportation, and border violence are shocking communities, as troops raid US cities, rounding up migrants and bystanders alike, while ICE abducts migrants even at routine immigration hearings. But few people know about the language workers who are fighting back, in solidarity with migrants from here in the Bay Area to the US-Mexico border, and far beyond. As reported by Mission Local and SF Gate, at Mission Cultural Center on October 30th, 2025, migrants and linguists from around the world emphasized the importance of language, both as a weapon of state violence and as a means of resistance, as Respond Crisis Translation’s Language Justice Forum offered first-hand testimonies about the multiple crises that are facing migrants today.
The night began with a welcome from Ariel Koren, Executive Director and co-founder of Respond Crisis Translation, and an interpreter herself. She introduced the audience to the Trump administration’s new “Bring-your-own-interpreter” policy, through which asylum seekers’ cases are dismissed if they aren’t able to bring their own interpreter to asylum field interviews. Bringing an interpreter is nearly impossible for most people, as it is financially unfeasible, and most often, qualified interpreters are not available – in any language, and especially Indigenous languages.
With this policy, asylum seekers are forced to make the impossible decision between undergoing proceedings in languages they are not fluent in, or having no interpreter at all. The state then uses the mistranslations to justify dismissing cases, detaining, and deporting asylum seekers. The mistranslations are systematic: here in the Bay Area as elsewhere, ICE has abducted hundreds of people from our community — and then forced them to sign documents in English without explaining what is written. These documents are used to justify deporting people or disappearing them to prisons in unfamiliar states or cities.
Language Justice Forum Panel - Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco
At RCT’s Language Justice Forum, attendees learned about further issues facing migrants at sites across the world, hearing from translators working in Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, Brazilian Portuguese, and more. Presentations included testimonies on ICE abductions in asylum proceedings: Antonela and Felipe, migrants from Peru and Colombia, shared their experiences of abduction by ICE from Bay Area courthouses.
The night continued with a workshop demonstrating a little-known but increasingly important issue facing migrants: the use of machine translation to process asylum claims at the border. Drs. Alex Hanna and Timnit Gebru of the Distributed AI Research Institute, both board members of RCT, presented an attempt to communicate in a typical tourist experience in the Tigre language, demonstrating the vast difference between machine translation and a live translator in a language spoken by one million people in the Horn of Africa, but inscrutable in machine translation. The workshop underscored the importance of live interpretation, and also the need for pathways to professional positions for multilingual people who can offer lifesaving services in minoritized languages–a project that is now underway in the Respond School of Language work, which is beginning its first pilot program with linguists in Gaza.
The night ended with a searing presentation from translators who have survived the Israeli genocide in Gaza, where they have experienced displacement, loss and the trauma of relentless militarized violence–all while working as translators on RCT’s Arabic languge team. The linguists from Gaza shared harrowing stories of their experiences, both suffering the violence of the past two years, and also, the hope and empowerment they have found through their work as translators
