Tag: Languages

🇺🇸🗽⚖️ NDPA SUPERHERO 🦸🏽‍♀️ MARIA DANIELLA PRIESHOFF: Cut The Dehumanizing Language! — “[T]he more dehumanizing language we use, the more likely it is that we will see immigrants as the “other” to justify cruel immigration policies.”

Maria Daniella Prieshoff
Maria Daniella Prieshoff
Senior Attorney
Tahirih Justice Center
Baltimore, MD
PHOTO: Tahirih

https://otherwords.org/retire-this-dehumanizing-language-about-immigrants/

Four Central American girls at a tent for U.S. asylum seekers in Reynosa, Mexico. For years now the U.S. has forced asylum applicants to wait in Mexico, often for years and in dangerous conditions. (Shutterstock)
Four Central American girls at a tent for U.S. asylum seekers in Reynosa, Mexico. For years now the U.S. has forced asylum applicants to wait in Mexico, often for years and in dangerous conditions. (Shutterstock)

Retire This Dehumanizing Language About Immigrants

Human beings fleeing persecution are not a “flood” or “surge.” And it’s not “illegal” when they cross the border to seek asylum.

Daniella Prieshoff

Last year, my client Susan called me to discuss her immigration case.

During our conversation she referenced the news that immigrants were being bused from the southern border to cities in the North, often under false promises, only to be left stranded in an unknown city.

In confusion and fear, Susan asked me: “Why do they hate us so much?”

While I couldn’t answer Susan’s question, her underlying concern highlights a startling escalation of public aggression against migrants over the past year.

There seems to be a growing “us” versus “them” mentality towards immigrants. This divisive language serves no purpose other than to divide our country, undermine the legal right to seek asylum in the United States, and cultivate a fear of the most vulnerable.

A clear example is showcased in recent media coverage of northbound migration across the U.S.-Mexico border. Many outlets describe recent migration through the Americas as a “flood,” “influx,” “wave,” or “surge”— language that reinforces the notion that migration is akin to an imminent, uncontrollable, and destructive natural disaster.

These descriptions are accompanied by sensational photographs and videos of long lines of brown and Black immigrants wading across the Rio Grande, crowding along the border wall, or boarding Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) vehicles to be transported to detention.

Woven into this framing is the near-constant use of the term “illegal” or “unlawful” to describe unauthorized crossings. As an advocate for immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual violence, and trafficking, I’m alarmed by the use of this language to describe a migrant’s attempt to survive.

Moreover, it’s often simply incorrect. A noncitizen who has a well-founded fear of persecution in the country from which they’ve fled has a legal right — protected under both U.S. and international law — to enter the United States to seek asylum.

When mainstream media wield the term “illegal” as though it were synonymous with “unauthorized,” they misinform readers and falsely paint asylum seekers as criminals.

Worse still, they encourage politicians who call immigrants themselves “illegals,” a deeply dehumanizing term. And the more dehumanizing language we use, the more likely it is that we will see immigrants as the “other” to justify cruel immigration policies.

We must retire the use of this inflammatory rhetoric, which distracts from real solutions that would actually serve survivors arriving at our borders.

Migrants expelled back to their home countries are at grave risk of severe harm or death at the hands of their persecutors. Those forced to remain in Mexico as they await entry to the United States are increasingly vulnerable to organized crime or abusive and dangerous conditions in detention.

And those who have no choice but to desperately navigate dangerous routes to the United States to avoid apprehension are increasingly dying by dehydration, falling from cliffs, and drowning in rivers.

The words we use in everyday discourse mean something — they can spell out life or death for those among us who are most vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Now more than ever, I’d urge the public and the media to retire the use of sensationalizing, stigmatizing, and misleading imagery and rhetoric surrounding immigration.

Now is the time to apply accuracy and humanity in our depictions of migrants. Let’s not repeat the errors of our past.

***********************

Thanks for speaking up, MDP!

Dehumanization of the “other” has a long ugly history in the U.S., of course going back to enslaved African Americans, Native Americans, and the Chinese Exclusion Laws. 

We also see that dehumanizing language has extended from asylum seekers and other migrants to the LGBTQ+ community, Asian Americans, advocates for social justice, homelessness, handicaps, economic disadvantages, women, government officials, political opponents, etc.

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

05-05-23

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COURTSIDE EXCLUSIVE — INSIDE EOIR — “TRASHED IN TRANSLATION: EOIR’S Latest Attack On Due Process In Immigration Courts Shocks Professional Interpreters, Outrages Judges!”

EYORE
“Eyore”
Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”

TRASHED IN TRANSLATION: EOIR’S Latest Attack On Due Process In Immigration Courts Shocks Professional Interpreters, Outrages Judges!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt for Immigrationcourtside.com

Alexandria, VA, July 1, 2019. No, it isn’t as dramatic as pictures of drowned families and caged toddlers. But, the effects of the latest move by those running our U.S. Immigration Courts and their political handlers could turn out to be just as deadly. Judges and interpreters were shocked by EOIR’s recently announced truncation of the right to receive effective live interpretations during master calendars as well as more management-ordered “aimless docket shuffling” which both denies due process and artificially “jacks up” already overwhelming backlogs.

How important is master calendar? It’s where individuals make their initial appearance in court and are advised about their right to a lawyer, procedures for obtaining pro bono counsel, given warnings, plead to charges of removability, seek bond if detained, have possible relief from removability explained, file applications for relief like asylum, have hearing dates and filing deadlines set, learn the DHS position on applications, have current address confirmed, receive DHS fillings, make and receive rulings on preliminary motions, and receive warnings as to the dire consequences of failure to appear and meet filing deadlines, to name just some things that go on. In other words, “important stuff.”

What happens when non-judicial politicos interfere with judges’ individual case scheduling and docketing by setting artificial limits on when and how they use interpreters? Cases that have been rescheduled numerous times over the years get “moved to the back of the bus” once again.

Individuals and their lawyers faithfully show up for their long-awaited individual “merits” hearings, sometimes after having traveled hundreds of miles, witnesses and families in tow, only to be informed by a clerk that their cases have been taken off the docket without notice for the “convenience of the agency” and will be rescheduled for some unspecified later date. Evidence goes stale, memories fade, witnesses become unavailable, lawyers move on to other jobs, and country conditions change as these cases drag on literally forever because of political meddling and management incompetence. Perhaps worst of all, these same politicos and bureaucrats engineering the delays and backlogs attempt to shift blame to the victims and judges by limiting legitimate continuances, “expediting” cases that aren’t ready to be heard, and dishonestly calling for totally unneeded restrictive changes in the law.

Ostensibly, the truncation of interpretation resulted from mismanagement on the part of these same politicos and bureaucrats who hired additional judges in a hurry without planning for those judges’ support needs, including in person interpreters. And, take it from me as someone who spent thirteen years on the immigration bench and heard thousands of cases, “telephonic interpretation” is not by any means the equivalent of “in person” interpretation Indeed, at some point, I found the process for telephonic interpretation so time wasting and inadequate, that I just stopped using it. But, that was way back when individual judges had at least a little control over what happened on their dockets and what was necessary to achieve due process in an individual case.

More likely, this move is just another step the intentional “dumbing down” of the immigration court process and the systematic dismantling of what little remains of constitutional due process for those pleading for their lives in a system doing its best to “tune them out.” It will result in more illegal removal orders.

However, these will be hard for appellate courts to detect upon review, because they might not be readily apparent from the English language version of the transcripts. Besides, some Article III courts have also abandoned their duties to the Constitution in a mad rush to “rubber stamp” as many defective removal orders as possible to “clear” their own overcrowded dockets at the expense of integrity, fundamental fairness, and quite frankly, innocent lives.

So shocking has become this “under the radar” further de-professionalization of what disingenuously holds itself out to be a ”court” that readers have been sending me anonymous comments from some distraught individual professional court interpreters. Here’s what one such concerned interpreter had to say (edited to preserve confidentiality);

“Bottomline, no more in-person interpretation for master calendars. In addition, in-person interpreters will be assigned in three-hour blocks only. Judges will no longer be allowed to have two languages in one hearing. I think this means no more relay interpretation between indigenous languages and Spanish. I’m concerned about language access being curtailed.”

These further disgraceful developments, showing a complete disregard for legal norms and individual fairness, should be carefully documented in congressional oversight hearings with an eye toward a future independent Article I immigration court. In the meantime, the Article III courts could and should put a stop to this travesty and force the system to meet at least minimal standards of professionalism and due process pending needed legislative reforms.

No American citizen would want to trust him or herself to this parody of a court system. Yet, due process under our Constitution applies equally to “all persons,” not just citizens, and the stakes in these cases often are life or death. If we refuse to defend the rights of the least among us, who will stand for our rights when the forces of oppression shift their ugly gaze? Even exaulted, yet too often complicit, life-tenured Article III judges should be asking themselves that question.

*****************************

PWS

07-01-19

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