In May 2023, a Spanish-speaking detainee at the McFarland immigration detention center in California struggled to tell a doctor, in broken English, that he sometimes bled from his rectum.
Without calling for an interpreter or making sure his patient understood what he was about to do, the doctor proceeded to perform a rectal examination that shocked and traumatized the man, he recalled in an interview with The Times.
“I felt very ashamed, helpless,” the man said, adding that he never received a diagnosis or follow-up from the doctor. “I feel like it was an abuse because he didn’t explain anything to me. I don’t understand much English.”
The man was eventually transferred to another facility, where a different doctor explained to him through a Spanish interpreter exactly what he would do during the exam.
Her experience was one of many language access failures documented in a report released Thursday that found the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was failing to provide adequate translation services required by federal law and its own rules.
The report, conducted by the immigration clinic at Cardozo School of Law in New York, surveyed more than 200 detainees and legal service providers across the country, and reviewed more than 800 complaints from 2016 to 2022 about language access issues. The information was provided by the Department of Homeland Security in response to federal records requests.
Most respondents said they never received language assistance at a law library and had to rely on other detainees to help translate confidential documents.
Detainees complained that they were unable to submit requests for medical care because the center's staff spoke only English and relied on hand gestures to communicate crucial medical information. Some said they suffered pain until they were deported because they could not communicate that they needed medical attention.
Legal service providers reported having clients whose medical conditions worsened due to delays in treatment caused by the lack of an adequate interpreter.
“The very nature of ICE’s language access failures makes it effectively impossible for detained individuals (who are not fluent in English) to raise, challenge, or remedy these issues on their own,” the report states.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to a request for comment.
The report's authors said the Biden administration's new asylum rules, which seek to speed up the process, make adequate language access even more crucial.
Unlike criminal defendants, detained immigrants generally do not have the right to a government-appointed attorney. As such, language access in detention center law libraries is essential for non-English speakers “to even understand the charges against them, let alone prepare any kind of legal defense in the face of deportation,” the report states.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement internal policies require detention facilities to provide detainees with interpretation services for medical care and law libraries, as well as translation of written forms.
In a 2020 report, Matthew Albence, then a senior ICE official, wrote that the agency had done an “excellent job” of providing detainees “meaningful access to programs and activities in a language they can understand.”
But during a review last year, the Department of Homeland Security's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties said it had received 208 complaints related to language access over the past five years, opened 116 complaint investigations and issued 118 recommendations to immigration officials regarding those violations.
The problem of language access has worsened as migrants attempt to cross the border from an ever-increasing diversity of countries.
Last year, ICE detained immigrants from 170 countries who spoke dozens of different languages, including some less common ones native to regions of Latin America and West Africa.
A man who speaks Soninke, a West African language, told the report's authors that he did not know why he was being held at a facility in Pennsylvania (or that it was connected to an immigration case) because all of his documents were in English and no one at the facility understood him or provided interpretation.
Jennifer Norris, managing attorney at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles, said she has seen the issue permeate every step of the legal process, from finding an attorney to challenging the federal government's arguments in immigration court.
He said cases can stall and migrants remain in detention while immigration authorities try to find a suitable interpreter.
Norris said her client Vrej, a 52-year-old Armenian from Iran, was denied immigration benefits during his initial court hearing, held before she began representing him. Reading the transcript of the hearing, she noticed that Vrej had been assigned an Armenian interpreter from Armenia who did not understand his dialect.
Again and again, the transcript indicates “Untranslated” in Vrej’s responses. Finally, the interpreter spoke up.
“Your Honor, this is the interpreter speaking. I have the feeling that the defendant does not understand me 100 percent,” the interpreter said, according to the transcript.
Vrej, who has been detained for almost two years, appealed the decision and is now awaiting another trial.
