Developing Tools to Combat Anti-Black Racism in the US Immigration System

By Kate Goldman, Head of Academic and University Partnerships at Respond

Through a grant from the Provost’s Office at Brown University, Respond Crisis Translation will help generate a training program for interpreters and translators who work in languages spoken by African migrants, materials for partner organizations that can be used to raise awareness among detainees and others, and templates for frequently used forms including information related to COVID-19 in several target languages.

The plight of migrants and asylum seekers has worsened over the past few years as the Trump administration has taken steps to limit access to asylum, legal services, and language justice. Across the US, these developments have disproportionately affected Black migrants and asylum seekers, many of whom do not speak English or Spanish, the languages in which resources and services tend to be provided. Upon arrival, many Black migrants and asylum seekers find that their assimilation is shaped by anti-immigrant and anti-Black forms of xenophobia and white supremacy. They find themselves and their families thrust into a racial climate that they have limited tools to navigate. For their part, translators and other social service providers often have the capacity to meet the linguistic and legal needs of migrants, lacking access to an intersectional toolkit that approaches resource provision through an empowerment and racial justice lens.

In partnership with faculty, students, and staff at Brown University, Respond and the Providence-based Refugee Youth Power Summit (RYPS) will develop a training program and outreach strategy for interpreters and translators who serve detainees and other migrants impacted by anti-Black racism within the US immigration system. Receiving this training will allow volunteer translators--many of whom are refugees themselves--to access paid work that benefits their communities and provides them with higher pay rates than they might otherwise access.

Over the course of the next few months, this team will develop: 

• a toolkit and workshop training program to be offered to: a) volunteers of Respond, and other translation and direct service organizations who work in languages spoken by Black migrants;

• materials in several target languages can be used by partner organizations to raise awareness among the specific experiences that Black migrant detainees and refugees face; and

• templates for frequently used forms such as US immigration documents and information on Covid-19 in several target languages. These templates will address the commonly neglected needs of migrants from African countries. 

We would like to express our gratitude to the Provost’s Office at Brown University for selecting this proposal to be funded through the Addressing Systemic Racism Fund: Advancing Knowledge through Research and Programming.

1. The Refugee Youth Power Summit (RYPS) is a two-week, intensive program for high school refugee youth in Providence. The summit has three central goals: to bring together young leaders in the refugee community, to cultivate critical ideas and tools necessary for creating social change, and finally to engage in collective action. Now in its fourth year of operation, RYPS has cultivated a powerful network of refugee youth leaders who would: 1) help develop the toolkit and workshop on intersectional approaches to racial and migrant justice given their political education experience through RYPS; 2)  serve as outreach coordinators to African refugee populations in Rhode Island through their family and social networks; 3) help facilitate the trainings using the toolkit on anti-Black immigrant racism with community members.