California Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragan on Monday urged the Federal Communications Commission to follow plans to modernize the federal emergency alert system and provide multilingual alerts for natural disasters to residents who speak languages other than English at home.
The call has been nearly five months since the fatal fire in Los Angeles threatened communities that threatened most Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and highlighted the need for multilingual alerts, with limited proficiency in English.
In a letter sent to FCC Republican Chairman Brendan Kerr, Barragan (D-San Pedro) expressed “deep concern” that the FCC under the Trump administration has enabled multilingual wireless emergency warnings for serious natural disasters such as wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes and tunamis.
“It’s lifesaving,” Barragan said in an interview with the Times. “There are around 68 million Americans who use languages other than English. Everyone should have the ability to understand these emergency warnings. We should not consider politicizing alerts.
Barragan said multilingual emergency warnings should be introduced nationwide. However, the Pacific Pallisard and Eton fires in January reminded us that it is particularly necessary in Los Angeles.
Not only is LA a major risk of wildfires, floods, landslides and earthquakes, but there is also a diverse migrant population in the vast area, some of which have limited English proficiency.
“We have wildfires in California when you think about it, we are constantly receiving earthquake warnings,” Barragan said. “In other parts of the country, it could be a hurricane or a tornado. We just want people to have information about what to do.”
Four months ago, the FCC was supposed to publish an order that allowed Americans to get multilingual alerts.
In October 2023, the FCC approved rules to update the federal emergency alert system by allowing wireless emergency alerts to be delivered in more than 12 languages, not just English, Spanish and sign language, without the need for a translator.
The Public Safety and Homeland Security Administration has since developed a critical disaster warning template in 13 most commonly spoken languages in the United States. In January, the committee declared a “big step forward” in expanding the alert language when commercial mobile service providers issued reports and orders that require templates to be installed on their mobile phones within 30 months of the release of the federal register.
“The language you speak should not prevent you and your family from receiving the information you need to stay safe,” then FCC Chairman Jessica Rosenwersel said in a January statement.
But soon, Trump ruled the White House. Under Brendan Kerr’s chairman, the committee has yet to release its January 8th report and order in the Federal Register. This is an important step that will trigger a 30-month compliance clock.
“This delay is not only irreducible, it’s dangerous,” Barragan wrote in a letter to Carr, signed by almost 20 members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Congressional Asia-Pacific American Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus. “It directly puts the community’s ability to receive emergency information that saves lives in the language they best understand.”
Barragán pointed out that Carr had previously supported the promotion of multilingual alerts when he was a member of the committee before taking over leadership.
“The failure to complete this ministerial step — despite supporting the rules themselves, this life-saving policy has significantly delayed access to multilingual alerts for millions of Americans,” she writes.
When asked by the Times that she explained the delay, her office said it was said that Trump’s regulators were barred from releasing federal register rules until designated Trump officials can review and approve it.
“It’s all politics,” she said. “I don’t know why it’s stuck there or why the administration isn’t moving forward, but with everything recently, it seems they’re waiting for the president’s green light.”
Barragan also noted that multilingual alerts helped first responders.
“If there is a community that is supposed to be evacuated and you are not evacuated because you don’t know that you are supposed to be evacuated, it will only hurt the first responders and the emergency crew,” she said. “So I think this is a safety issue not only about the people who receive it, but also about the people around them.”
A study published earlier this year by UCLA researchers and Equity Alliances of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders found that Asian communities were harmed during the Liars in January, making it difficult to access information about emergency evacuation due to language barriers.
Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of the AAPI Equity Alliance, is a coalition of 50 community-based groups serving 1.6 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders living in Los Angeles, and told The Times that the FCC’s failure to push alerts in more languages represents a “true abolition of obligation.”
She noted that over half a million Asian Americans across LA County are classified as limited proficiency in English, with many speaking primarily in Chinese, Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese.
“President Trump and many members of his administration have made clear that they plan to launch an attack on immigrants,” Kulkarni said. “If this makes life easier for immigrants, they’ll get in the way.”
During La Fires in January, Kulkarni said residents complained that the fire warning was only being sent in English and Spanish. Of the 50,000 Asian immigrants, more than 12,000 of their descendants, who lived within four evacuation zones, Pallisard, Eaton, Hurst and Hughes, need language assistance.
“There were members of the community who didn’t notice the fire was close to them until they evacuated, so they had little to none of it,” Kulkarni said. “It can really mean life and death in many cases where untranslated information is not available in cities or counties like Los Angeles.”
Members of the community suffered not only in their own right, but also because federal and local officials were unable to provide alerts in a language understood by all residents, not just the fire itself.
“It is an obligation to make alerts available,” she said. “We need people at local, state and federal levels to play their part so that individuals can survive catastrophic events.”
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