Giving Compass' Take:

• Joseph Darius Jaafari explains how changing immigrant demographics are increasingly stressing American immigration courts, which struggle to find translators. 

• Can technology help to close gaps in access to translators? What is needed to ensure that all immigrants have clear and sufficient translation services? 

• Learn how to effectively communicate immigration's costs and benefits


Migrants often speak languages that are little known in the U.S. (except maybe in New York City): K’iche’ from Central America, Urdu from Pakistan, Creole from Haiti. American immigration judges have a hard time finding enough interpreters to show up in courtrooms.

Now the Justice Department has ordered the judges to use more translators who work over the phone because of what the agency says are budget problems. But judges and lawyers say the quality of the telephone translations suffers and may be leading to unfair deportation trials.

The head of the immigration-court system emailed judges Dec. 11, telling them to use phone interpreters for languages except Spanish, according to leaders of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

Federal law requires an interpreter be present for an immigration hearing whenever a defendant does not speak English. The courts typically have staff translators for Spanish and Mandarin, the two most common foreign languages they deal with.

But in the past five years, more and more immigrants have been coming to the U.S. from Central America speaking uncommon languages such as K’iche’, used by Mayan people in Guatemala. Last year it was the 12th most frequent language spoken in immigration court, just behind French.

“There might only be literally a couple dozen of people anywhere in the U.S. who speak this language that 20,000 people in the world speak,” said Scott Shuchart, co-author of a report by the left-leaning Center for American Progress on language access for migrants.

Because there are so few translators for these languages, interpreters are hard to find and mostly available only over the phone. But dial-in interpretation is often inadequate, because the translation services are hard to schedule and the quality of the telephone connections can be poor, critics say, adding that these problems are worsening backlogs in immigration courts across the country.

Read the full article about translation challenges in immigration courts by Joseph Darius Jaafari at The Marshall Project.