A child's legal fate hinges on answering forty standardized questions whose chronological, cause-and-effect form assumes a coherent story the child can produce on demand. The violence and displacement that brought them rarely fit this format, so the questionnaire that is meant to surface danger often fails to register the very trauma that would justify asylum.
Protection in the immigration system flows not to the most endangered but to those whose experience can be rendered into the court's recognized categories of persecution. A child whose suffering cannot be translated into the required legal grammar becomes invisible to the system regardless of actual risk.
The influx of unaccompanied children is publicly labeled an 'immigration crisis,' a framing that locates the problem at the border rather than in the hemispheric conditions, including US-fueled gang and drug economies, that produced the exodus. Naming it a crisis of arrival rather than of causation absolves the receiving country of its share in the violence.
Interpreting a child's words for the court is never neutral transfer; word choice, omission, and emphasis shape whether the child reads as credible and deserving. The translator sits at the hinge where a life can be opened or closed, making language itself a site of power rather than a transparent medium.