Highlighting our Impact: Partnership with Al Otro Lado
"My client advocated for himself and in part felt empowered to do so because he had all of the evidence he needed to make his case. He and his family are still safe and healthy in the US to this day. I have seen countless other asylum seekers who won their case after the judge requested specific evidence to back up a part of their story, and then were able to provide that evidence thanks to Respond. Respond’s translation services literally save lives.”
Maddie Harrison
AL OTRO LADO (AOL)
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your story?
My name is Maddie Harrison (she, her, hers), and I’m from Minneapolis, MN. In 2018, I saw the news about the large caravans of asylum seekers that were approaching our border seeking refuge. When I saw the level of militarized violence that they were met with, which was encouraged by the Trump administration, I felt powerless. I didn’t know how to fight back against this kind of state violence, so I began researching how I could support asylum seekers. This is when I found Al Otro Lado (AOL) and signed up to volunteer over spring break for a week. After that first week I felt drawn to the resilient spirit that exists at the border and the need to continue doing this work. One week turned into two months and eventually I quit my job and transferred into a program that would allow me to finish my bachelor’s degree online while in Tijuana. I volunteered with AOL full-time for the following year and was hired as staff in July, 2020. Prior to working with AOL, I was working in special education.
Can you tell us about Al Otro Lado, its mission, and your team? What is your role and what is your day to day like?
Al Otro Lado is a bi-national, social justice, legal services organization. We have offices in Tijuana, San Diego, and Los Angeles. AOL works to provide services directly to asylum seekers, migrants, and deportees, as well as working on litigation efforts to push back on anti-immigrant policies and state violence that affects immigrant communities. I work for the Border Rights Project located in Tijuana, Mexico. At the BRP we work with asylum seekers who are forced to wait for long periods of time in dangerous border cities either because they are made to wait on the illegal metering list before they are allowed to enter the US and seek asylum, or because after entering they were returned to Mexico to wait while their court process unfolds in the US as part of the “Migrant Protection Protocol.” MPP traps asylum seekers in Mexico where it is almost impossible to find US immigration attorneys as well as quality and affordable translation services. Due to this, asylum seekers in MPP are typically forced to go through their asylum proceedings with no legal representation. The court requires that along with an asylum application, asylum seekers submit any evidence they have that backs up their stories. This evidence is required to be translated into English and organized in a specific way with a table of contents that can be difficult to replicate without legal assistance. Often, this is required of documents as simple as a birth certificate in order to “prove” identity or prove relationship to one’s children.
As the Translations Coordinator, I work as a part of a larger team that prepares asylum seekers who are stuck in MPP to represent themselves. We have volunteer attorneys who prepare the asylum applications for our clients and discuss which types of evidence would help support their case. I review this evidence with clients, submit it for translation with Respond, and then organize the translated evidence into packets with a table of contents so that it can be presented to the judge. I also review the evidence packets with clients so that they understand and feel empowered to use their evidence during their court proceedings.
Prior to the pandemic, the volume of clients that were receiving translation services was so high that some weeks we had up to 100 families requesting these services. Working at the border, there was no normal “day to day” structure as every day presented new crises and challenges that you would have never considered previously. Given the high volume of need during that time, my job was a constant cycle of meeting with clients to review evidence and working to prepare that evidence in time for their next court date, as well as assisting in coordinating pro se asylum workshops, conducting know your rights training with clients, and onboarding new volunteers. Now that the US government has closed the border for over 6 months and has effectively stopped the flow of immigration and asylum into this country, the volume of translation requests has slowed down dramatically. We now provide completely remote services to our clients and as an organization a lot of our work has shifted from not just providing legal services but also trying to connect our clients to other humanitarian services as they are stuck in extremely vulnerable positions during this pandemic.
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?
Before we started partnering with Respond Crisis Translation, I had a small team of about 30 translators that I was managing, in addition to managing client interactions, dealing with the daily chaos of the border, and managing the follow up steps of preparing the evidence for court. It was not a sustainable workload and the capacity of what we were able to do was therefore limited. When we started partnering with Respond, even as a brand new organization, they already had hundreds of translators that were ready to help our clients and a structure that made it much more sustainable. Many people said that we did not have the capacity to pull off a translations project at AOL, but thanks to our partnership with Respond, we did.
Is there a specific success story (or stories) that stands out for you?
One of the first cases I worked with Respond Crisis Translation on had over a hundred pages of documents that required translation. Many of them were complex medical documents with notes in messy handwriting from doctors. This client was awaiting court in Tijuana with his family when their baby got seriously ill. With the translated evidence he was able to prove to the judge that his child was ill, and that he was unable to receive adequate medical care in Tijuana. He convinced the judge to parole him and his family into the US where they could continue their asylum proceedings and receive the necessary medical care. This is something that can be difficult to accomplish even when you have a lawyer making the argument for you. This client advocated for himself and in part felt empowered to do so because he had all of the evidence he needed to make his case. He and his family are still safe and healthy in the US to this day.
I have seen countless other asylum seekers who won their case after the judge requested specific evidence to back up a part of their story, and then were able to provide that evidence thanks to Respond Crisis Translation. Respond’s translation services literally save lives.
What are the greatest challenges inherent in your work? Can you share the language-specific challenges and context that come up frequently?
Doing legal rights work with asylum seekers at the border under this racist, facist, xenophobic, genocidal Trump regime during a global pandemic is full of challenges. Our country has not had friendly immigration policies for a long time, however this administration has taken it to a different level. As a part of their political campaign, this administration has made it their mission to enact as much violence on immigrants as possible. This looks like militarized violence at the border, mass deportations, mass incarceration in COVID-ridden ICE detention centers, family separation, trapping people in dangerous border cities and policies aimed at destroying what's left of our already weak asylum system, among countless other atrocities. No matter what tool this administration is using, the results are always the same; human rights abuses and people traumatized or harmed.
Every day we work with clients who have faced unimaginable trauma at the hands of our government, either by government actors themselves or because of the dangerous situations our government forces people into at the border. It is devastating to know that asylum seekers come to our country fleeing persecution and looking for safety, only to oftentimes be further traumatized by a system that supposedly exists to offer protection. Every week there are new policies that make our work more challenging and complicated than it was before, every day there are new crisis situations that we could have never imagined before.
On top of all of these stressors that our clients are facing, they are often going up against a system that is not in their native language, often with questionable translation services offered by the state. This is another tactic that is used to confuse and intimidate people. In the translations project at AOL we work primarily with Spanish speakers and occasionally with indigenous language speakers. Due to being stuck in Tijuana throughout their court proceedings, there is no other realistic way for most asylum seekers to access quality, affordable translation services. Without the translation of their evidence, they would not be able to fully tell their stories to the judge. Translating evidence may seem like a small part of a huge process, but our goal is to arm asylum seekers with all the tools necessary to go up against a system that is completely stacked against them, and to empower them to fight their cases, to advocate for themselves and to win. Having translated and organized evidence is an important part of helping our clients feel empowered and prepared. While my work is primarily focused on written translation, AOL also collaborates with Respond using their telephonic interpretation services, which allows us to serve clients from a diverse set of linguistic backgrounds that we otherwise would not be able to serve due to our own language limitations.
Anything else you’d like to add about the importance of language access to your work, or just anything else you´d like to share about yourself / your work in general?
Everyone deserves the right to seek protection, freedom to move across these fake borders, and the ability to access necessary legal services. These rights should never be hindered because of the language one speaks. I just want to give a huge thank you to all of the amazing people who help run Respond and all of the translators who put so much of their heart and time into this work. It inspires me every day to know that there are so many people fighting for our clients and I believe that it takes all of us to take on a system as powerful as the US government. There are so many different ways to work towards burning this entire system down and towards building something that actually works for the people, and working to provide language access and justice is an incredibly important part of that. Thank you!
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Since September 2019, Respond Crisis Translation has fought to provide interpretation and translation services for anyone experiencing language barriers.
