Asylum claims, court hearings, and detention proceedings in the United States depend on documents and testimony in English. When a person speaks a language that courts and agencies don’t routinely staff, the case can stall or fail for that reason alone. Respond Crisis Translation works in that gap.
About the organization
Respond Crisis Translation describes itself as an abolitionist language justice organization. It provides around-the-clock, trauma-informed translation and interpretation to migrants, refugees, and others for whom language blocks access to safety. The network works in more than 200 languages, including Indigenous languages of the Americas such as Akateko, Chuj, K’iche’, Kaqchikel, Kichwa, Mam, Mixteco, Náhuatl, Popti’, Q’anjob’al, Q’eqchi’, Quechua, Tz’utujil, and Zapotec, as well as several sign languages. It translates asylum applications, declarations to stop deportation, credible fear interview transcripts, and Know Your Rights materials, and provides interpreters for attorney interviews, USCIS interviews, court, and medical and psychological evaluations. Partners include the ACLU, Al Otro Lado, RAICES, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Haitian Bridge Alliance, among more than 600 organizations and collectives.
The organization treats language work as labor. It prioritizes paying translators and interpreters who are themselves refugees, deportees, or otherwise systems-impacted, offers training in areas such as trauma-informed interpretation and U.S. asylum processes, and supports its network with a multilingual team of therapists. Its Language Rights Defense project documents language rights violations in the immigration system.
From: Respond Crisis Translation, a nonprofit network of translators and interpreters based in San Francisco and working remotely worldwide
For: Migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees, and the legal, medical, and grassroots organizations that work with them
Format: Document translation, live interpretation, transcription, voice recording, and language justice trainings
Cost: Free for individuals, families, and grassroots organizers; sliding scale for organizations with budgets
Where to start
- Request translation or interpretation through the intake form, which is available in fourteen languages.
- If you speak a language in the network, or one not yet listed, apply to join the linguist network. Most work is remote.
- Organizations can arrange staff trainings on language access and language rights in immigration court by writing to training@rct.org.
The project asks how communities can produce and share knowledge under new restrictions. Respond’s answer is infrastructure: a paid, trained network of language workers, many of them directly affected by the immigration system, who make legal and medical information usable across more than 200 languages.