In northern Oregon, just before dawn in October 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested and shackled two farmworkers on their way to work. The man and woman were Guatemalan citizens who spoke no English and very little Spanish. They spoke Mam, an Indigenous Mayan language.
Despite the man trying to tell an ICE officer as much, he was not provided with an interpreter, according to his sworn declaration. Suspected of being in the country illegally, they were detained in an immigration processing center and signed papers they did not understand. They were released later with ankle monitors and placed under an intensive supervision program requiring frequent check-ins at an ICE office in Portland.
Their experience points to a problem that reaches far beyond Oregon.
The civil liberties guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution broadly apply to everyone in the U.S., regardless of immigration status. Courts have held that the right to an interpreter is protected by the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to a fair trial – including understanding court proceedings and communicating with counsel. It’s also protected by the Fifth and 14th amendments, which state that no person can be deprived of “life, liberty, or property, without due process.”
But in a multilingual society, these rights collide with how little most Americans, including law enforcement and court professionals, are taught about language itself. Speakers of minority languages, or languages that are not commonly used in schools, courts or government, are often disadvantaged by this lack of linguistic awareness. This can even affect nonstandard English speakers or people who speak a variety of English that differs from the mainstream varieties privileged in courts and schools.
Imagine an English speaker detained abroad and forced to navigate a criminal trial in a language they do not understand. Most people would recognize that as fundamentally unfair, but speakers of minority languages often face this reality in U.S. courtrooms.
These failures are poised to multiply. Early in his second term, President Donald Trump issued an executive order designating English as the official U.S. language and rescinding a 2000 executive order that directed federal agencies to provide language access – despite the fact that around 25 million people in the U.S. have limited English proficiency.
At the same time, the Trump administration has sharply expanded an immigration crackdown that targets Latino communities. In immigration enforcement, heavily reduced training may be leaving ICE officers with limited understanding of constitutional protections, sweeping growing numbers of Indigenous-language speakers into a legal system unequipped to communicate with them.
As a linguist, translator and courtroom interpreter for the Ch’ol language – a Mayan language spoken by roughly a quarter of a million people – I see firsthand the ways in which the court system is unprepared.
Minority and Indigenous languages
More than 30 Mayan languages are spoken today by roughly 7 million people; they’re not dialects of Spanish but members of a separate linguistic family and have their own vocabulary, grammar and sound systems, as distinct from one another as the languages spoken across Europe. A speaker of Ch’ol would not be able to understand Mam, as is the case for thousands of other minority or Indigenous languages worldwide.
Since 2015 I have worked in southern Mexico with speakers of Ch’ol, and since 2023 I have been an expert witness and court interpreter. I have twice worked with defendants suspected of having learning disabilities, when, in reality, they had just been provided interpretation in the wrong language.
Consequences in the courtroom
A lack of awareness about language diversity and linguistic needs can have serious consequences in the courtroom. In the 1980s, a speaker of a Mixtec language was wrongfully convicted of murder after a trial conducted through a Spanish interpreter, a language he barely spoke. Four decades later this problem persists: In Texas in 2022, a man who spoke the Northern Tepehuan language was convicted of possession of marijuana with intent to distribute and sentenced to 24 months in prison despite not understanding his court proceedings.
Data on linguistic diversity is more available in Los Angeles and New York City, two cities with large Indigenous populations. But in other areas of the country, court systems are unprepared for diverse linguistic needs. Even the 2020 census, which researchers and Indigenous-rights advocates say undercounts these communities, recorded more than 1.3 million people identifying as Latin American Indian. Still, in court files and immigration records, Indigenous-language speakers are typically logged as Hispanic or Spanish-speaking, erasing the distinction that determines whether someone gets an interpreter they can understand.
Although neither ICE nor Customs and Border Protection tracks Indigenous immigrants or the languages they speak, reporting at the border suggests as many as 1 in 5 people in immigration detention are Indigenous.
By one estimate, speakers of Indigenous languages represent between 10% and 44% of new arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border, but without the right language services, misunderstanding and bias can push asylum-seekers to abandon valid claims and return to dangerous situations or otherwise jeopardize their chances of gaining entry.
Indigenous language–speakers are denied asylum in the U.S. more often than speakers of more commonly spoken languages. In one instance, when a woman was asked to describe a domestic abuse injury to a judge, one interpreter used the word “heel”; another, later, used “ankle.” In Mam, “heel” and “ankle” are the same word, but the inconsistency led the judge to think the asylum-seeker was changing her story. The judge ordered her removed.
A broader impact
The failure to respect language and dialect diversity threatens the fairness of the legal system for immigrants and citizens alike, as linguistic discrimination can extend to varieties of English as well.
Court reporters are required to transcribe at a minimum of 95% accuracy, but that measure does not evaluate their ability to transcribe nonstandard English. In one study, researchers tested more than two dozen Philadelphia court reporters and found that when it came to African American English, their transcriptions were less than 60% accurate, sentence by sentence. AAE is a group of varieties of English spoken by many Black communities in the U.S. with their own rule-governed syntax, lexicon and phonology that make them distinct from mainstream American English. Inaccurate transcription, the study explained, can lead to errors that “change the official record of who performed what actions under which circumstances, with potentially dramatic legal repercussions.”
In 2012, George Zimmerman killed unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin and was charged with second-degree murder. Rachel Jeantel was on the phone with Martin before his death and, so, was a key witness for the prosecution. She testified for nearly six hours – including about the start of the encounter and who confronted whom, a question central to Zimmerman’s self-defense claim – but jurors found her testimony not credible and ended up disregarding it. One said it was hard to understand. Zimmerman would eventually be acquitted.
AP Photo/Orlando Sentinel, Jacob Langston
It is difficult to show how many people are affected by linguistic discrimination. Unlike people whose proficiency in English is low, AAE speakers are not counted as a distinct linguistic group, so the scale of the harm is undocumented. Nevertheless, one study showed that witnesses with foreign-accented English are viewed as less credible, and studies in both the U.K. and the U.S. found that speakers of nonstandard varieties of English are perceived to be guiltier.
In cases involving stigmatized varieties of speech, expert witnesses could help jurors understand linguistic diversity and separate how someone speaks from whether they are credible. Expert witnesses could also help jurors understand what linguistic discrimination is and explain that biases against someone’s language are often masked biases against their race, gender or socioeconomic background.
‘The last bastion of overt social discrimination’
The case against the two Mam-speaking farmworkers in Oregon was challenged in court, and in January 2026 a federal judge found the agents’ actions to be “reckless and erroneous.” The judge ordered ICE to remove their ankle monitors and end the supervision program imposed on them. Neither was convicted of a crime.
Despite the ruling in the farmworkers’ favor, though, their case reflects a broader problem: Although the right to an interpreter is constitutionally protected, that right means little when courts and officers are unaware of linguistic needs. Education for law enforcement and court officials on linguistic diversity, early language identification and increased funding for interpretation services are all essential before the courts can deliver on the rights the Constitution guarantees.
As sociolinguist James Milroy argued in a 1998 essay about linguistic discrimination in education, unless societies become more educated about linguistic diversity, “the last bastion of overt social discrimination will continue to be a person’s use of language.”
