This month’s feature is contributed by LCJ Hub member Hillary Mellinger, an Assistant Professorof Criminal Justice and Criminology at Washington State University. Hillary’s research focuses on language access within the U.S. immigration and criminal justice systems, the challenges that asylum applicants and attorneys encounter at the U.S. Asylum Office, and the criminalization of migration. Prior to earning her doctorate, she worked as a Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) Accredited Representative at the Tahirih Justice Center, a national nonprofit organization that supports immigrant women and girls fleeing gender-based violence through a combination of legal representation, social services and public policy.
In a recently published, open-access article, I describe the challenges that asylum applicants and attorneys encounter regarding interpretation at the Asylum Office. Whereas U.S. immigration courts are required to provide interpreters pursuant to the Court Interpreters Act of 1978 (28 U.S.C. § 1827), the Asylum Office is beholden to a different legal statute, one that requires asylum applicants to procure their own interpreters at no expense to the government (8 C.R.F. § 208.9(g), barring exceptions for sign language, unaccompanied children, or other exceptional circumstances (see, e.g., the
