Working Through an Interpreter With a Detained Client

Almost every emergency filing in this field rests on a telephone call. The client is in a facility, often several states away, speaking a language the drafter does not, on a line that was scheduled rather than chosen. The call may last twenty minutes and may not repeat before the deadline. Everything it has to accomplish should therefore be decided before it starts.

Arranging the call

Access runs through the facility and follows the facility's procedure. Some require a written request identifying the attorney and the detainee. Some operate scheduled slots. Some route requests through the enforcement field office rather than the facility. Establishing which applies is a separate task from making the request, and doing it in the wrong order costs a day.

The privilege of representation in these proceedings exists at no expense to the government, which shapes what can be asked for. Facilities are obliged to permit access; they are not obliged to make it convenient, and they will not supply an interpreter for a call with counsel. Both of those constraints have to be planned around rather than argued about at the point of need.

Where no representation has yet been arranged, the published list of providers is the practical starting point, and it is worth consulting before the facility procedure is even reached. A detained person with no representative and an imminent deadline needs somebody admitted and available more urgently than they need any particular strategy.

Timing within the day matters as well. Facilities schedule legal calls within defined hours, and a request made late in the afternoon may not produce a slot until the following day. Where a deadline falls the next morning, the request should be made as the first task after the location is confirmed rather than after the drafting is under way.

Booking the interpreter first

For any language the office does not cover internally, the interpreter is the binding constraint on the whole timetable. Facility slots are offered rather than negotiated, and a slot that cannot be used because no interpreter is available may not be replaced for days. Booking an interpreter on standby across a window is the arrangement that survives a scheduling system nobody controls.

Uncommon languages make this worse in a way that is easy to underestimate. A language with few available interpreters can add days to a timetable measured in hours, and the search should begin at the moment the language is known rather than when the call is scheduled. Where an interpreter of the precise dialect cannot be found, that fact should be recorded, because it becomes relevant to any later question about what the client understood.

Monitoring practices differ and should be established rather than assumed. Facilities distinguish between ordinary detainee calls and calls with counsel, and the arrangements for each are not identical everywhere. Where the position is unclear, it is worth asking directly before discussing anything sensitive, and worth telling the client what the answer was so that they can decide what to say.

Conducting the call itself

A written agenda, in order of necessity, is the difference between a productive call and a frustrating one. The first items should be the ones no filing can proceed without: confirmation of identity and file number, authority to act, the account of what happened, and the location and contact details of any relative who can supply documents.

Interpreted calls run at roughly half speed, which has to be built into the plan rather than discovered halfway through. Questions should be short and single-clause. Long compound questions produce answers to whichever part the interpreter rendered last, and the drafter will not know which part that was.

Anything that will appear in a sworn document should be read back through the interpreter and confirmed. That step feels slow and it prevents the most damaging category of error: a declaration filed in the client's name containing something the client did not say. The material this produces is the material described in the account of evidence obtainable in a day.

It is also worth saying plainly at the start of the call what the call is for and how long it has. A client who has been waiting for days to speak to somebody will reasonably want to describe everything that has happened, and cutting across that without explanation damages the relationship the case depends on. Naming the constraint at the outset, and promising a fuller conversation later, generally produces cooperation rather than frustration.

Recording what was agreed

Instructions taken on a call should be written up immediately, while the wording is fresh, with the time of the call, the interpreter's name and language, and the substance of what was authorized. A note made two days later is a reconstruction, and it will be treated as one if the authority to act is ever questioned.

A signed authorization should be pursued in parallel through whatever document route the facility permits. Where the timetable does not allow it, the position should be disclosed in the filing rather than left implicit, and the alternative of proceeding on somebody else's behalf may need to be considered, as set out in the account of acting for a relative who cannot instruct counsel.

The same call discipline applies to screening interviews, where a consultant's preparation happens on exactly this kind of line under exactly these constraints, as the account of the fear interview describes. In both settings the limiting factor is access rather than argument, which is why families are usually told to reach a firm that can reach a detained client quickly before anything else is decided. A filing cannot be built from an account nobody has been able to take.