A “systematic denial of language access” at a Louisiana immigration detention center prevents asylum seekers from receiving protection, violates detainee’s rights and disregards U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s own policies, according to a complaint recently filed by immigrants rights groups.
The complaint was submitted to officials at the New Orleans ICE Field Office as well as several oversight offices within the Department of Homeland Security. It alleges that non-English-speakers detained at Winn Correctional Center do not have access to adequate interpreter and translation services, keeping them from understanding important legal documents, disciplinary reports, medical information and even verbal commands from detention staff.
“Language access has implications for fundamental rights across every part of detention,” reads the Aug. 12 complaint, which was signed by RFK Human Rights, the Cornell University Immigration Law and Advocacy Clinic and the Southeast Dignity Not Detention Coalition.
Sarah Decker, an attorney at RFK Human Rights, said advocates estimate that English is not the primary language for the vast majority of people in immigration detention.
“What has resulted in Winn, as one of the largest facilities in the region, is that they just simply don’t have the structure to support people who are non-English speakers,” she said.
Decker said language access barriers exist across the U.S. immigration detention system, but advocates are particularly concerned with Winn — a privately-run former state prison in Winn Parish — because of its growing population and a history of civil rights complaints against the facility alleging negligence, violence and abuse.
“When viewed together, these complaints paint a troubling picture about the conditions of confinement for those held at Winn,” the complaint said.
In 2021 Homeland Security civil rights investigators issued a memo that said ICE should reduce the population at Winn to zero until “immediate health and safety concerns can be corrected.” As of last month, the facility housed nearly 500 more people than it did when that memo was made public, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University,
Despite urging from immigrants rights groups and U.S. lawmakers to stop housing immigrants at Winn Correctional Center, the Biden Administration renewed the facility’s contract this year.
LaSalle Corrections, the private prison company that operates Winn, did not respond to Verite News’ requests for comment on language access denials or other civil rights violations at Winn.
‘Are they expecting us to understand English in just three weeks?’
Cornell Law School students first discovered Winn’s language access issues during a visit to the facility last September, when multiple detainees they met with said they were having difficulty accessing information in their preferred languages.
Over the course of six months, students and their supervisors interviewed 21 detainees at Winn in their primary languages using interpreters to better understand the communication barriers they faced. They found language access issues not only affected immigrants’ daily lives in detention, but also their immigration cases.
Among the interviewees was Dervis Sahin, a Turkish asylum seeker with little English proficiency. The complaint said his difficulties accessing information in his language were similar to many other non-English speakers at Winn.
Sahin did not understand his asylum application form. The questions – asking for details about his fear of persecution if he were to be deported – were all in English. He tried to answer them from inside Winn, but access to legal resources was extremely limited. Whenever he gained access to the facility’s law library, he would be given only an hour to try to translate the information he needed from English to Turkish.
“That’s nowhere near enough time to put together an asylum case, especially if you have to translate documents and materials,” Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer, a Cornell law professor who supervised student interviewers, said.
Under ICE’s detention standards, detainees should ideally have 15 hours per week of library access with a minimum standard of 5 hours per week. The standards also call for facilities to provide law books in languages other than English.
A representative from ICE did not reply to questions from Verite about language access issues at Winn.
In an interview, Sahin said in one of his immigration court appearances, a judge told him to bring the completed application form to his next hearing, in less than a month, or face deportation.
“How can we do that without understanding clearly what the form means and what the question means?” Sahin said, speaking through an interpreter. “Are they expecting us to understand English in just three weeks?”
Deportation and discipline
Sahin, who, like most immigrants in detention, was representing himself, could not complete the form. A judge denied him asylum and ordered him deported. He remains detained at Winn while he appeals the judge’s decision.
Kelley-Widmer said students reported that multiple interviewees said they were unable to litigate their cases because of lack of information in their preferred languages.
“People give up because they are so disheartened by not understanding the process,” she said.
Sahin also said he had difficulty communicating with facility staff.
“They don’t approach you as a human being,” he said.
According to the complaint, Winn guards gave Sahin a disciplinary writeup — the complaint does not specify what kind of offense he was charged with — without offering him translation services so that he could understand the allegations.
“It’s harder for them to comply with officers’ directives,” Kelley-Widmer said. “And then they’re more likely to experience things like disciplinary actions because they didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing.”
The complaint said Sahin was denied access to the commissary as punishment and that detainees have complained of being punished with solitary confinement for refusing to sign documents that they do not understand. It said detainees have experienced delays in medical care because they were not provided with access to an interpreter service during visits to the facility’s clinics.
Under ICE’s standards, detainees should be granted “frequent informal access to and interaction with key facility staff members as well as ICE staff in a language they can understand.”
Kelley-Widmer said the variety of languages spoken by immigrants in detention makes that directive nearly impossible.
“When we were there for two days last September, we saw people who spoke 20-plus languages,” she said. “That just tells us that it would be practically very difficult for the facility to keep up with the high number of people that are there and the high number of languages.”
She said that’s reason enough for Winn to be shut down. Short of closing the facility, the complaint asked ICE to prioritize people who speak rare languages, for which it is hard to find interpreters, for release from detention, increase access to the facility’s law library and access to quality interpreters and translators.