Respond Crisis Translation

Bay Area Community Interpreter Abducted by ICE while Interpreting = Release Kubanych Moldobaev! Calling all immigrant rights defenders, interpreters, language justice advocates!
Kubanych is an asylum seeker from Kyrgyzstan who was abducted by ICE on October 30, 2025 while translating for his friend at his ISAP interview in San Jose, CA. Despite Kubanych immediately requesting voluntary deportation to Kyrgyzstan upon detention, ICE has continued to keep him imprisoned for 8 months at the California City Detention Center where he has witnessed and experienced routine torture, humiliation, and abuse. Kubanych is one of thousands of migrants being subjected to horrendous conditions by the Trump administration while being left in legal limbo as ICE continues to ignore his request for reunification.
Action items to help Kubanych reunite with his wife and four young children:
1.⁠ ⁠Call and email using the toolkit to pressure ICE to comply with Kubanych's request to return to Kyrgyzstan
2.⁠ ⁠Donate to help Kubanych’s family afford the cost of reunification
3.⁠ ⁠Share this post widely

The Trump Administration has signed agreements with 33 countries to receive forcibly deported asylum seekers, refugees and other immigrants. Often with no warning, with no chance to raise fears of persecution, they are sent to “third countries” where they have no ties, don’t speak the language, and are subjected to grave mistreatment, detention, and torture.

“Third-country deportations are motivated by linguistic and cultural deprivation: they rely on fear in an unfamiliar environment to break migrants. In this multicultural context, interpreters play an essential role in ensuring that migrants are heard and understood across linguistic and cultural barriers”, says Aymeric, RCT’s French Team Lead.

Our Spanish and French teams have been supporting the cases of 15 people from Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador who were forcibly deported to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“Taking these people’s passports and sending them to countries they do not know and where their language is not spoken endangers their physical integrity, safety, and most basic ability to communicate, ask questions, understand, and make themselves understood”, according to Raquel, RCT’s Spanish Team Lead. 

While our teams are supporting the cases on the ground, head over to ThirdCountryDeportationwatch.org, a project by and with the support of and , to learn more about these forced deportations.

🆘 BRING LETY HOME 🆘

Lety Rojas, member of our partner organization Instituto Familiar de la Raza, has recently been detained by ICE in Las Vegas. Lety has lived in the U.S. for 23 years, since she was only 7 years old. This is the only home she has truly known. She does not have immediate family in Mexico, which makes this situation even more painful and uncertain.

Her family and friends are raising funds to help with legal fees, immigration attorney costs, and for communication costs during this difficult time.

Every donation, no matter the amount, helps lighten the burden and brings us one step closer to bringing her home.

DONATE NOW: bit.ly/support-lety

Respond Crisis Translation stands in solidarity with Lety, her family and her friends. We — translators, interpreters, and language workers — demand her immediate release!
Please share this fundraiser, donate and talk about it!

Language workers, translators and interpreters are at the center of resistance and liberation movements. Yet language workers are invisibilized, silenced, overlooked, even disappeared. 🆘

In solidarity with workers around the world, we amplify the resistance, mobilization, and tireless work of our translators and interpreters, whose work gives a voice to those most marginalized and silenced. ✊

„I am a translator from Afghanistan, formerly employed by the U.S. This is what I want you to know — and do.“

Read and listen to what our colleague Ahmad, the Director of the Afghan Languages Team at Respond Crisis Translation, has to say to the world. 

It is very rare that the violence against Afghans makes global and Western headlines even in spite of the unprecedented crisis facing Afghanistan and its people. Amidst this recent escalation by the Trump administration, which comes on the heels of other tragedies such as the death of Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal in ICE detention, the U.S. government’s raids and mass arrests of Afghans, and the cancelation of TPS for Afghans, we believe that Ahmad’s story is extremely relevant and deserves to be heard.  

An often forgotten part of the story about Afghanistan and the U.S. occupation and its subsequent withdrawal is the entrapment that translators were left to survive (or in many cases, were killed by). Translators were employed by the U.S. and served its occupation, but the U.S. left Afghan translators behind and denied their asylum claims, endangering their lives as translators became one of the most persecuted groups under the Taliban after it retook power. 

Ahmad, whose name is changed to a psuedonym for his safety, is our team’s Afghan Languages Director and has lived this cruel phenomenon firsthand. He had his refugee status stripped away and has been stranded in exile in a country that neighbors Afghanistan. In the country he currently resides while in limbo, Afghans are persecuted, hunted down, and forced to live in hiding and constant threat of capture and deportation simply for being Afghan. Even from exile and in hiding, he works tirelessly on behalf of Afghan asylum seekers. 

We urge you to:
* Support Afghan translators
* Ensure that Afghans can access support
* Donate
* Follow Afghan organizations
* Amplify Afghan voices 
* Advocate relentlessly for protection and pathways to citizenship for Afghan refugees around the world!

17 people have been killed in ICE custody in 2026 alone. That is one death every six days. We remember them — and all those killed before them.

These are not isolated deaths. They are the result of an immigration system built on dehumanization, disappearance, and deprivation. People in ICE detention are forced to navigate systems they do not understand. They are made to sign papers they cannot read. They plead for care without interpretation. They endure transfers, hearings, and punishment without clear information. 

Language access is a human right. Without it, people are denied the ability to express their needs, be heard or understood, and access care and support. They are denied their fundamental rights.

ABOLISH ICE

Data source: ICE.gov, KFF, NPR, American Immigration Lawyers Association, American Immigration Council, TRAC Reports

„[The uncertainty] is the worst part. Every single day, you can’t sleep because you’re afraid when you go to bed, where are you going to wake up?“
- Meenu Batra on CBS News

Meenu Batra, 53, has lived in the U.S. for over 35 years, having fled anti-Sikh violence in India. For more than 20 years, she worked as a court interpreter in Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu — the only licensed interpreter in Texas for all three languages — supporting people through immigration court proceedings.

However, on March 17, 2026, she was stopped by plainclothes ICE agents at Harlingen International Airport while traveling for work. Despite having valid work authorization under “withholding of removal”, she was handcuffed and taken into custody.

She has since been held detained in Texas, where she reports being denied food, water, and medication following her arrest. Her attorney says the government has not explained her detention or where she may be sent, raising concerns about her being removed to a third country.

Batra spent decades helping others navigate the immigration system. Now she is inside it, facing the same conditions of uncertainty and deprivation.

Her case sits within the broader expansion of Trump’s mass deportation agenda, which continues to target people with deep community ties and long-term presence in the U.S. This is not an isolated case — it is a system at work.

We stand in solidarity with Meenu Batra, her family, all our partner organizations and all those incarcerated by the U.S. regime. We demand her release! We remain steadfast in our fight against ICE!

💻 Free online event: Refugees & AI
🔗 RSVP: bit.ly/rct-dair-event

This Friday, April 17, Respond Crisis Translation and the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) are coming together to for „On Refugees and AI“ — an online event centering the lived experiences of refugees and migrants and their power-building work against surveillance technologies.

Surveillance systems do not stay in one place. Technologies tested on Palestinians are exported to the EU and the US, where they are used to police, harass, and criminalize refugees and migrants. Those most impacted by these systems are also among the first to understand and resist them.

Join the event to learn about the role of language workers in crisis contexts, and how our community shows up alongside migrants, asylum seekers, genocide survivors, and others navigating displacement, detention, violence, and language rights violations.

The program includes:
• Session 1: Introduction: Refugees and AI
• Session 2:Refugees, Migrants, and Border Surveillance
• Session 3: From ICE Abductions to Genocide in Gaza, Language Workers Resist
• Session 4: Possible Futures Workshop: Imagining Better

📅 Friday, April 17, 2026
🕘 9 AM–12 PM PT / 5–8 PM CET / 7–10 PM EAT
💻 Online
🔗 RSVP: bit.ly/rct-dair-event

Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal, 41 years old and a father of six, had worked alongside U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He survived U.S. war and displacement only to die in ICE custody less than 24 hours after being detained. He is already the 12th immigrant to die in ICE custody in 2026.

Mohommad’s case is not an exception. It is closely tied to U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan. The U.S. used Afghan lives, labor, and language during occupation, then abandoned Afghans to persecution, exile, detention, and death. Afghan people did not survive war only to be hunted, detained, and left to be killed by the same state that once called them allies.

This violence is also linguistic. When Afghan translators and language workers are abandoned, Afghan migrants are pushed through asylum, court, medical, and detention systems without the language access they need to survive. Language deprivation is not incidental to border violence. It helps make that violence possible.

ICE is already trying to justify Mohommad’s death with criminalizing language and racist smears. We reject that narrative. We demand a full independent investigation, the truth about what happened in custody, and justice for his family.