Jessica López-Espino is a legal and linguistic anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research with Latinx parents in a California child welfare court and the attorneys, social workers, and judges working on processing their child custody and parental rights cases. In this talk, she draws on ethnographic research conducted in a California child welfare court with Spanish-dominant Latinx speakers navigating English-dominant court proceedings with state-certified Spanish language interpreters. She will discuss Spanish-dominant Latinx parents’ experiences of linguistic marginalization despite the provision of certified interpreters for on-the-record hearings and demonstrate how attorneys, judges and interpreters who are part of the regular working group in court express concerns about linguistic marginalization and mobilize metapragmatic distinctions and discourses of linguistic sympathy as an informal, social response to addressing particular instances of linguistic marginalization.