By Lauren Villagran
Albuquerque Journal
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Francisca Lares Ralios, chained at the ankle and wrist, shuffled up to the podium in federal court.
She wore a loose braid in her black hair and stood barely taller than the waist of her 6-foot-2-inch public defender. She was second-to-last in a long line of defendants earlier this month facing sentencing by U.S.
Judge Kenneth Gonzales for felony illegal re-entry - meaning she had crossed the border illegally more than once, the Albuquerque Journal reported.
It took a moment longer than usual to get the proceedings going since Lares Ralios — like an increasing number of the undocumented immigrants criminally prosecuted in the Las Cruces federal court — speaks almost no Spanish. She speaks K’iché, also spelled Quiché, a Mayan language native to the highlands of Guatemala.
Indigenous communities throughout Mexico and Central America have long sustained patterns of migration to the U.S. But the federal court in Las Cruces only recently began seeing a variety of languages for which it previously had no ready interpreter, defense attorneys say.
The increased flow of migrants from Central America over the past two years has subtly shifted the linguistic makeup of the newcomers at the Southwest border.
Mam — a Mayan language spoken by more than half a million people in Guatemala — last year displaced French as one of the top 10 languages spoken in the U.S. immigration court system, according to the Department of Justice Executive Office for Immigration Review. K’iché ranked No. 11.
An assistant to the court dialed a phone number over a broadcast system, and a woman’s voice came on the line. She spoke English to the courtroom and K’iché to Lares Ralios, who was so soft-spoken the interpreter had to ask her to repeat herself several times.
Before issuing her sentence, Gonzales asked Lares Ralios if there was anything she would like to say. The interpreter translated the judge’s words, and then Lares Ralios spoke. The interpreter translated her words for the judge: “I would like to go home and go along with my family.”
Last fiscal year, 44 percent of the more than 331,000 immigrants apprehended by Border Patrol at the Southwest border came from Central America. Guatemala alone is home to at least 25 indigenous languages, according to Ethnologue, an online catalog of the world’s known living languages.
The linguistic variety recently seen in the Las Cruces court — including Mexican indigenous languages, such as Nahuatl, Mixteco and Triqui — has presented challenges for the attorneys tasked with representing the speakers and for the court, which is required by the Department of Justice to provide translation.
“That’s the hard part with these cases,” said Andre Poissant, the federal public defender who represented Lares Ralios. “We often don’t have access to interpreters until an hour before a hearing.”
Gonzales sentenced Lares Ralios to 35 days in jail: the time she had already served. He recommended she be reunited with a young son and nephew who were in the care of Child Protective Services — they had crossed the border illegally together, her attorney said — with the intention that they might be deported to Guatemala together.
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