Access to asylum depends on language access. When governments return asylum seekers without providing adequate language services, they risk committing refoulement in contravention of international law.

The principle of non-refoulement undergirds international and U.S. refugee law, mandating that governments refrain from returning people to situations where they are likely to face certain harms. This Article introduces linguistic refoulement as a tool for understanding the complex interaction between language and refugee law. When a person is forced to return to a dangerous situation in their home country due to the language they speak, the expelling country has committed linguistic refoulement. Governments contravene critical protections for asylum seekers when they fail to recognize and mitigate the multiple ways in which language functions as a nexus of direct or constructive refoulement.

To develop this linguistic-refoulement framework, this Article employs a case study: monolingual speakers of Mexican, Central American, and South American Indigenous languages seeking asylum in the United States. Reports from the border suggest that this population represents between 10% and 44% of new arrivals to the U.S.-Mexico border. As this Article documents, many of these migrants are deported on account of the languages they speak, leading to their disproportionate refoulement to situations of persecution and torture. Through this mixed-methods case study, the Article develops a taxonomy of five mechanisms of linguistic refoulement that lead to the disproportionate return of minority-language speakers: neglect (failing to provide appropriate language services), erasure (failing to collect and record language data), illegibility (failing to comprehend or credit a manner of communicating), punishment (penalizing asylum seekers for language differences), and isolation (detaining or segregating people away from others who speak their languages).

Scholars of refugee law and language access focus primarily on one mechanism of linguistic refoulement: the failure to provide interpreters during asylum hearings. This focus, while important, has overshadowed the other ways in which language functions as a nexus of refoulement. Only by understanding the varied ways in which unmet language needs produce refoulement can governments and advocates meaningfully identify and protect refugees, preventing their return to situations of persecution, torture, and death.