The U.S. government claims to provide proper translation at all points in the immigration process, but, in practice, it rarely offers Mayan-language translation at the border or in holding cells. (A spokesperson from Customs and Border Protection said, “We use a third-party translation service via telephone when we are unable to communicate due to language barriers. We do our best to make sure we can communicate accurately, with everyone, throughout their time in our custody.” ) Until just a few years ago, there was a tendency to treat Mayan languages as “dialects.” A former immigration judge told me that all her Mayan-language cases, when they came from Customs and Border Protection, were “listed on the court docket as Spanish.” When Mayan-language asylum seekers can manage some Spanish, it is often not enough to navigate credible-fear interviews—in which migrants must explain why they are afraid of returning to their home countries.

Between April and June, 2018, the Trump Administration adopted a “zero-tolerance” policy, intended to deter migration at the southern border. As part of the policy, parents were forcibly separated from their children. That July, Martín got a call from Asociación Mayab. Lawyers at the border were looking for Mam speakers to translate for detained migrant families. Martín travelled to the U.S. Border Patrol Central Processing Center, in McAllen, Texas, which became notorious for holding children in cages made of chain-link fencing. He ended up translating for a migrant named Mario Perez Domingo, who spoke “barely any Spanish,” according to his lawyer, Efrén Olivares, of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Domingo and his two-year-old daughter had been picked up by a Border Patrol agent who asked for their papers and then accused Domingo of forging his daughter’s birth certificate. The agent asked in Spanish if he had “paid for the certificate,” and Domingo said yes, because Guatemalans pay a small fee to the civil registry for birth certificates. The Border Patrol argued that Domingo had bought it on the black market and that the child was not his daughter, and took her away. (BuzzFeed reported on this separation.)

Domingo didn’t have the language skills to explain. Not even Olivares, his lawyer, could fully understand what had happened. During Domingo’s criminal hearing, he was given only a Spanish-language translator. On the stand, he kept talking about a son who had been taken away. “But he didn’t have a son, he had a daughter,” Olivares said.

By the time Martín got involved, Domingo had been transferred from McAllen, so they talked on the phone. In fewer than five minutes, Martín had the facts of the case. I asked if Domingo spoke Spanish. “Not to the point where he could really explain himself or be able to understand what was going on,” Martín said.

I asked if language was a factor in the separation, and Martín said, “Definitely.” Martín is generally unflappable, but an edge of anger came through. “They know that they can get away with it.” The father was reunited with his daughter only after taking a DNA test, a month later, and then both were released.

Extended detentions or deportations caused by mistranslation or lack of translation are not rare. A former volunteer at the South Texas Family Residential Center, in Dilley, Texas, the nation’s largest immigrant-detention center, told me that cases can turn on the difference between competent and incompetent translation. A mother held there told non-Guatemalan interpreters that she had had “trouble” in Guatemala because of her “blouses,” which sounds innocuous in English. She meant her huipil, a handwoven blouse worn by Mayans. She was saying that she was persecuted for being indigenous, but the interpreter didn’t understand or explain. The woman’s claim was rejected, and she was deported.

According to a filing by the A.C.L.U. last August, a father accused of a crime was separated from his son without a Q’eqchi’ translator present. During the six-month separation, the child “began to forget his family’s native language, and he suffered extreme isolation because of his inability to speak Spanish, English, or any language common in the shelter,” according to the filing. Another boy was separated “due to father’s alleged mental health problems; child advocates later determined father’s indigenous language may led [sic] to wrong mental health concern.” By the time U.S. authorities acknowledged that there was no mental-health problem, they had deported the father.

Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the A.C.L.U., which brought a lawsuit to stop the child separations, told me that, of more than five thousand parents separated from their children, at least eight hundred were deported without them. “A significant number of those were indigenous,” Gelernt said. His team found that half were Guatemalan, and that “ten to twenty per cent” were from indigenous-majority departments, such as San Marcos, Huehuetenango, and Quiché. (Children were taken from their parents before the zero-tolerance policy took effect, and about eleven hundred have been taken since it was ruled unlawful.) “The indigenous population was likely the least able to understand their rights, and may therefore have been more susceptible to losing their children and waiving away their own asylum rights,” Gelernt said.

Both Olivares and Gelernt believe that the system denies basic rights to Spanish-speaking asylum seekers as well, but that difficulties are exacerbated for Mayan-language speakers. “The language barrier contributed, at least in part, to a lot of those separations,” Olivares said.

Then there are the deaths. “Kids dying on the border are Mayan,” Naomi Adelson, the interpreter who trained Martín at Asociación Mayab, told me. Six children have died in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security since Donald Trump took office. Five were indigenous. Jakelin Caal Maquín, a seven-year-old Q’eqchi’ girl, had a fever that spiked on a long bus ride from the New Mexico desert, where she was picked up with her father, to a Border Patrol detention center. She died from a bacterial infection that led to multiple-organ failure after she received no medical care for ninety minutes. Felipe Gómez Alonzo, an eight-year-old Chuj boy, died of the flu as he and his father were shuttled between holding centers. President Trump placed blame for the deaths on the children’s fathers, who had signed intake waivers stating that their children did not need medical care. The waivers were in English, and officials provided a verbal Spanish translation—two languages that the fathers did not speak fluently or at all.

Mayan Guatemalans have a persistent problem: explaining to people that they still exist. The ancient Mayan cities collapsed in the eighth or ninth century, but the Mayan people remained, farming corn in small towns. One archeologist compared it to the fall of the Soviet Union: the structure of life has changed, but the people are still there. All the Mayan languages share a common root, but most of them are mutually unintelligible. Yucatec Mayan is tonal, like Cantonese. K’iche’, the language of the “Popol Vuh,” has six or ten vowels, depending on the dialect. Mam is produced far back in the mouth and comes out softly raspy. The variations are not a mark of being cut off from external influences, the linguist William Hanks told me, but, rather, a sign of development. Mayan languages have had four thousand years to ramify. “Mayans have never been isolated,” Hanks said. In 1990, the Academy of Mayan Languages of Guatemala was formed, and a branching linguistics tree, showing the common origin of all Mayan languages, became a symbol of the Pan-Mayan movement. (Mam emerged from the trunk about two thousand years ago.) There is still debate about which subdivisions should be counted as dialects. (A chestnut in the field of linguistics: “A language is a dialect with an army.” ) The introduction to the Academy’s official Mam-Spanish dictionary reads, “Language is the backbone of the culture and cosmovision of a people.”

Last summer, I visited Martín’s home town, Todos Santos Cuchumatán, in the lofty pine mountains near the border with Mexico, one of the coldest parts of the highlands. To get there, I drove through seven distinct language groups in two days. On the mountaintop just before the descent into the valley of Todos Santos, there is no running water—women fetch it from wells with plastic jugs. Suddenly, you start seeing men in cherry-red striped pants watering their vegetable patches.

Nearly everyone in Guatemala has some Mayan heritage, but the indigenous are considered a separate group, identified by language, place of origin, and, for women, colorful clothing woven on backstrap looms. (In Todos Santos, the men, too, wear traje.) Mayan people tend to be much poorer than non-indigenous Guatemalans, the result of a long history of oppression and land theft.

Some Central American migrants to the U.S. have adopted the slogan of the post-colonial immigrants’-rights campaigns in Europe, from the nineteen-eighties: “We are here because you were there.” In 1954, the C.I.A. backed a coup that overthrew a President who was overseeing land-reform measures that included expropriating United Fruit’s holdings. The coup led to a civil war that lasted from 1960 to 1996, during which Marxist-Leninist guerrilla groups tried to topple a series of U.S.-backed governments and dictatorships. In the early eighties, the Guatemalan Army believed—often wrongly—that Mayans were susceptible to guerrilla ideology. Soldiers pillaged indigenous communities, raped women and girls, and stole children who survived massacres, putting hundreds up for adoption. (Guerrilla fighters also attacked Mayans whom they believed were informing for the Army.) The Army burned houses and churches as well as cornfields—sacred sources of sustenance for Mayans. Two hundred thousand people died during the war, the Western Hemisphere’s bloodiest conflict of the twentieth century; eighty-three per cent of them were indigenous.

In Todos Santos, which was then a small cluster of adobe houses, the Army openly massacred Mam families, intending to terrorize the population. American Green Berets helped train a special-forces unit called the kaibiles, named for a Mam leader who had evaded capture by Spanish conquistadors. This unit committed the worst atrocities of the war. A Mam man told an anthropologist that, in 1982, soldiers captured an accused guerrilla fighter and summoned the people of Todos Santos to the town square. A soldier cut the man open from his neck to his belly. “Then he took out the liver of the poor man,” the witness said. “He grabbed the liver out, and he ate it just like that, in front of the soldiers, in front of the people. We did not understand.” After the war, a U.N.-backed truth commission found that the Guatemalan government had committed “genocidal acts” against Mayan communities.

Interpreters a generation older than Martín told me that, when they work on asylum cases, they must confront their own traumatic memories. One man translated for a woman who had been separated from her son at the border. He said that it was “living my experience all over again.” The woman described how her son had been pulled from her arms. At first, he was screaming. Then he began hyperventilating, and couldn’t get a sound out. Then the guards took him away.

When the interpreter was ten years old, his mother was kidnapped by the Army. “It was Sunday. I had climbed up into a tree to play with kites. My aunt came out. She’s one of those people with a strong personality, who doesn’t tell you things calmly,” he recalled. “And she said, ‘Come down out of there. They have taken your mom.’ ”

Despite the genocide, asylum status was hard to come by in the U.S., because Guatemalans were fleeing a regime that was supported by millions of dollars of U.S. military aid each year. In 1982, during the height of state terror, President Ronald Reagan met with the Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who was later convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. (The sentence was overturned shortly afterward, under political pressure.) Reagan praised Ríos Montt’s “progressive efforts” and said that he was “getting a bum rap on human rights.”

Indigenous people fared little better after the signing of peace agreements, in 1996. The country was opened to international mining and to palm-oil corporations, which have steadily encroached on indigenous land, forcing families to move to Guatemala City. Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj, a K’iche’ anthropologist and a public intellectual, wrote in the Guatemalan newspaper El Periódico, “The urban children, cornered into selling on street corners, were left choosing between an education for the poor that could only provide them with a survival-level job, or joining the gangs.” Interpreters told me that racism and even violent discrimination are such ingrained features of Guatemalan life that some Mayan asylum seekers don’t think to mention them in credible-fear interviews. They have plenty of other reasons to flee: gangs, death squads, domestic violence and femicide, disillusionment with a series of corrupt Presidents, and climate change, which is drying out cornfields—a spiritual as well as an environmental crisis. Guatemalans confound the distinction between “economic migrants” and the types of persecution that the U.S. requires to grant asylum.