Linguistic dimensions of the crimmigration regime: Language ideological working conditions in US Immigration Court

Abstract

This essay uses an examination of communication in Los Angeles Immigration Court (2014–2017) to demonstrate how legal professionals’ beliefs about language foster and entrench underexplored linguistic dimensions of the US crimmigration regime. Scholars have shown that within courtroom interactions, legal ideas about language hold back the administration of justice in asylum proceedings, and language interpretation itself can perpetuate the administrative violence of these proceedings. I combine ethnographic courtroom observations and critical examination of internal agency policy to show how ideas about language, inherited from legal professional culture and training, aggregate into adverse working conditions, allowing for only a performance of procedure, and amplifying the US crimmigration system. Of particular interest are ideologies of a monoglot standard and national language imaginaries, referentialism and referential transparency, and decontextualization. Abolitionist logics and reform of legal education offer possible strategies for structural intervention.