The Nonprofit at the Border That Translates 170 Languages

Last summer, Rosie Ibarra Lopez was meeting with a Mauritanian man at a US immigration detention center in Arizona, where she works with a nonprofit that assists asylum-seekers. She asked whether he spoke French. He shook his head. “Wolof?” she asked, a language spoken in parts of West Africa. Again, no. She reeled off a litany of possibilities, but each time the response was no. Finally she tried Pulaar, a language from the river basin shared by Senegal and Mauritania. He flashed her a look of relief.

Speaking no Pulaar, Ibarra did what advocates along the US-Mexico border increasingly do these days: She dashed off an email to Respond Crisis Translation, which was able to round up a Pulaar interpreter for her next meeting with the man. The goal, Ibarra says, is to prepare migrants for a legal process that can last months or even years, “but we can only do that if we have adequate interpretation.”