Language community fights back against attacks on migrants
Dear Respond Community,
We are working tirelessly to meet the need for support amidst the Trump administration’s cruel attacks on migrants and asylum seekers. We are responding to hundreds of requests to support asylum seekers and families. We remain mobilized and prepared, regardless of the blatant attempts to destabilize collectives and organizations like ours.
In spite of the efforts to instill panic and paralysis across the movement, we are rooted in a robust and thriving community of partners and organizers who are all collectively refusing to give into fear. We know that sowing confusion through countless executive orders, new policies, ICE raids, and fear tactics is one of Trump’s goals.
We at Respond Crisis Translation are translating, interpreting, and intervening to disrupt language rights violations, empower anti-deportation and border activists, and ensure that migrants have the resources, documents, and language access that they need to be protected and sustained in this fight for safety and liberation. Please reach out directly or here if there are additional ways we can support you, your organization, or your community; and, spread the word about our work.
Language barriers play a key role in perpetuating the confusion, fear, and abuse. The role of interpreters and translators during these times is essential. System-impacted interpreters need access to dignified wages to sustain this work. Please support them as generously as you can.
Whether under Trumpist fascism, or the Biden-era attacks on asylum, we know there is nothing new about the violence against communities that seek safety at U.S. borders, in most cases driven there by crises either caused or exacerbated by U.S. interventionism.
We were founded during the first Trump administration, and we aren’t going anywhere. It was under the first iteration of Trump’s evil Remain in Mexico policy that we —- values-aligned language workers, translators, and interpreters —- began to organize together under what would soon become the Respond Crisis Translation umbrella. We chose the name “Respond” because it is active. We resist the passivity, silence, and apoliticisim that often characterize linguistic academia and traditional translation and language spaces. As a language community, we don’t sit back while migrants are under attack. We mobilize when language is weaponized to stop freedom of movement. We lend our essential skills — our multilingualism — to everyone who needs them.
We spoke out when the Biden administration rolled out the dysfunctional CBP One mobile app, forcing all asylum seekers to initiate their processes on a glitchy platform that was unavailable and unintelligible in their languages. We condemn Trump’s recent move to dismantle the app altogether, forcing thousands of people who had managed to use this app to make appointments into a terrifying limbo.
We are steadfast in our support for all impacted by the vicious assaults on migrants and asylum seekers. We are grateful for each and every one of the language practitioners and activists in community and struggle with us.
In solidarity,
Respond Crisis Translation team
