Highlighting our Impact: Partnership with Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project
"We had a client who suffered severe persecution in Kazakhstan and only spoke Russian. Respond translated documents and research in Russian for the case. This was of immense help and not sure what would have happened if we did not find someone to assist us. This client later went on to win his asylum claim.”
Álvaro Gozález
Florence Immigrants and Refugee Rights Project
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your story?
My name is Alvaro Gonzalez, I was born in Jalisco, Mexico. My mother and two older sisters migrated to the United States when I was two. I grew up undocumented in Arizona up until President Obama announced Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). I attended college in Arizona, at Benedictine University Mesa, and graduated in 2018. In 2019 I started as the Volunteer Coordinator for the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project (Florence Project or FIRRP), and that same year I transitioned into my current role as Asylum Legal Assistant.
Can you tell us about Florence Project, its mission, and your team? What is your role and what is your day to day like?
At the Florence Project, we provide free legal and social services to detained men, women, and children in immigration proceedings in Arizona. I specifically work with adult men and women who are detained and seeking asylum. I am in charge of doing an initial interview with them and providing assistance to the attorney on their case. This includes country condition research, drafting their declaration, compiling evidence, and drafting direct examination questions to prepare them for their final hearing.
In what ways has the collaboration with Respond Crisis Translation helped your work or allowed you to do new things that you couldn´t have done before?
The collaboration with Respond Crisis has really facilitated our work and facilitated my time. A lot of our clients come with an abundance of evidence that is crucial for their case. This can include identification documents, medical records, criminal history records, police reports, letters from witnesses, all this just to name a few. As imagined this can take up a lot of time, and we have so much to prepare the client for and their case. Respond Crisis Translation is a reliable aid that we can count on to provide us with accurate and timely translations that become critical evidence in their case. This then allows me to spend more time speaking with clients and working directly with them, it gives them the emotional assurance that they have a team fighting for them.
Is there a specific success story (or stories) that stands out for you?
When I was in my Volunteer Coordinator role we had a client who suffered severe persecution in Kazakhstan and only spoke Russian. Respond translated documents and research on websites in Russian for the case. This was of immense help and not sure what would have happened if we did not find someone to assist us. This client later went on to win his asylum claim.
What are the greatest challenges inherent in your work? Can you share the language-specific challenges and context that come up frequently?
Some of the biggest challenges we face are working with clients who speak another language besides Spanish or English. This becomes an issue when having to translate documents, which can be very technical, like medical or criminal records. They require skilled translators to be able to accurately translate documents that become fundamental pieces of evidence in cases.
Anything else you’d like to add about the importance of language access to your work, or just about yourself / your work in general?
Language is important, and access to accurate and precise language in cases is fundamental, everyone should be able to understand what is going on in their case.
Help us make essential language access support possible for all in need →
Since September 2019, Respond Crisis Translation has fought to provide interpretation and translation services for anyone experiencing language barriers.
