US/Mexico Border – Indigenous asylum seekers struggle for interpreters in US (Luis Chaparro, Al Jazeera)

For Claudia, the journey from her small Guatemalan village to the US-Mexico border was complicated by the fact she could speak only her native Ixil, one of 21 Mayan languages in Guatemala.

On way to what she had hoped would be asylum in the United States, she communicated with the smugglers with hand gestures and the few words of Spanish she knew, to ask for water, food, money, and to go to the toilet.

Indigenous asylum seekers struggle for interpreters in US | Indigenous Rights News | Al Jazeera

Two Raramuri adolescents wait for a bus to go back to their home villages in the Sierra Tarahumara [Luis Chaparro/Al Jazeera]