As Mother Jones’ disability reporter, I was horrified to hear Emilio’s story.
Emilio, a Deaf man from Venezuela, was not given a sign language interpreter when he asked for more information about why he was being put on a bus at an ICE detention center. It was only when he reached the Mexican border that he realized he was being deported to a country he had never called home.
Over the past two months, I’ve been looking into the experiences of Deaf people in the midst of Trump’s deportation machine. It’s brutal on anyone, but Deaf people deal with an added level of language deprivation.
Per disability civil rights laws, Deaf people in ICE detention are supposed to have access to sign language interpreters, but that often does not happen. As a deaf public health professor told me, “Withholding communication access denies deaf people’s humanity.”
You can read my investigation here.
—Julia Métraux
