Parents essentially sign their houses over to the banks to get money to pay the smugglers. Their children get caught at the border, are sent home and everything is lost, Velasco explained. In the worst-case scenario, their children don’t even make it back.
Certain members of Congress want a law requiring taxpayer-funded legal representation for underage Central American migrants. I’ll ignore for now that there are not enough immigration attorneys, or room in our courts, to handle tens of thousands of long, drawn-out, and often dubious, cases. Instead, let’s focus on the big interpretation wall we’re going to hit because, as usual, nobody remembers the Mayans!
Not everybody in Central America speaks Spanish. This fact is slowly dawning on our politicians. San Francisco’s Mayor Ed Lee in an interview with the San Francisco Bay Guardian said: “I’m trying to wrap my arms around the fact that many of these kids don’t speak Spanish. They speak Mayan and different languages.”
Mayan is not one language but a native language family that includes many mutually unintelligible tongues. About 40 percent of Guatemalans are Mayan, and they speak around two dozen native languages, including M’am, Q’anjob’al, K’itche and Ixil.
Although young people who arrive here could learn basic English, if such a law were enacted, they would still need help to communicate with their lawyers and the courts. They would need legal interpreters. Here’s where it gets messy. For the Guatemalan Mayan language called “Ixil”, there is ONE legal interpreter in the whole country! Her name is Sheba Velasco and she’s been very busy of late. Hers is a mentally-stressful job. People expect her to help them stay in the U.S., but there’s nothing she can do legally for them except interpret the language. There’s so much work, she told NPR, “I can’t do all of it. It’s hard.”
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