Documenting Persecution and Trauma Workshops: Training on Forensic Evaluations and Country Reports for Asylum Claims

8 - 8:30 a.m.
Registration/breakfast

8:30 - 9 a.m
Welcome, acknowledgments, and introduction to the Midwest Human Rights Consortium.

Morning Session: Asylum Overview 

9 - 10 a.m
Asylum Law and Politics: The Critical Role of Health Professionals (Nicole Hallett)

10 - 11 a.m
Introduction to the Medical Asylum Evaluation (Rohini Haar)

11 - 11:15 a.m
BREAK

11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Psychological Evaluations of Asylum Seekers (Aimee Hilado)

12:15 - 1:15 p.m.
Lunch

Afternoon Session: Strengthening Forensic Evaluations 

1:15 - 2:15 p.m.
What Makes a Strong Asylum Claim? (Retired Immigration Judge James Fujimoto)

2:15 - 2:30 p.m
BREAK

2:30 - 4 p.m
BREAKOUT SESSIONS (for full session descriptions, click "Breakout Sessions" below):

• Nuts and Bolts of the Physical Evaluation and Medical Documentation (Rohini Haar and Minal Giri) (Room E-4)
• Psychological Evaluations with Adults (Ida Salusky) (Library)
• Psychological Evaluations with Minors (Rebecca Ford-Paz) (Room E-1)
• Writing Country Conditions Reports for Refugee Claims (Lindsay Gifford, Nicole Hallett) (Room W-1)

4 - 4:30 p.m.
Concluding remarks / next steps

Nuts and Bolts of the Physical Evaluation and Medical Documentation (Rohini Haar and Minal Giri)
This workshop will review the purpose of medical asylum evaluations and help attendees identify common modalities of torture and corresponding injuries and scars. Attendees will learn how to describe scars and injuries, consider mechanisms of injury, and use Istanbul Protocol guidelines to document scars. (Room E-4)

Psychological Evaluations with Adults (Ida Salusky)
Dr. Salusky will engage participants in an interactive session on setting up, conducting, and writing reports for mental health forensic assessments of asylum seekers. Participants will explore ethical distinctions between forensic and therapeutic roles, cultural factors impacting the selection and use of assessment instruments, the critical elements of a forensic mental health assessment, and options and formats for developing and presenting written reports. (Library)

Psychological Evaluations with Minors (Rebecca Ford-Paz)
This breakout will provide an overview of developmentally appropriate forensic psychological assessment procedures for young people seeking immigration relief. The session will cover interview considerations, recommended tools, guidance for collecting collateral information, affidavit writing tips, and a review of case examples. (Room E-1)

Writing Country Conditions Reports for Refugee Claims (Lindsay Gifford, Nicole Hallett)
Professor Nicole Hallett, Director of the Immigrants' Rights Clinic will share guidance for serving as an expert witness in asylum cases. Professor Lindsay Gifford, a refugee studies expert, will explain how to draft a country conditions report in support of an asylum claim. Participants will leave with a draft outline of their own country conditions template to support future asylum casework collaborations. (Room W-1)

Rebecca Ford-Paz, PhD is a clinical child psychologist and co-director of the Forensic Assessment for Immigration Relief (FAIR) Clinic at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, which provides psychological and medical evaluations to minors seeking asylum or other forms of humanitarian relief. 
 
Currently, in partnership with the University of Chicago Crown School and the Coalition for Immigrant Mental Health, Ford-Paz is the co-leader of the Reimagining Mental Health Supports for Migrants training initiative, funded by the IL Department of Human Services, which builds the capacity of front-line non-clinical providers to promote mental health and prevent mental health crises for recent migrant arrivals. She is also the Co-chair of the Mental Health and Wellness Subcommittee of the Chicago is With You Task Force in the Mayor’s Office of New Americans, tasked with operationalizing the Welcoming City ordinance in the City of Chicago. 

Judge James Fujimoto (retired), JD, was a partner in the immigration and civil rights law firm of Alexander, Fennerty and Fujimoto before being appointed to the Chicago Immigration Court in 1990. Since leaving the bench in May 2019, he has served as an adjunct professor and senior practitioner in residence with the Asylum & Immigration Law Clinic (AILC).  In the latter capacity, he provides substantive law and skills training to attorneys, Department of Justice accredited representatives, and the legal staff of immigrant-serving nonprofits with whom AILC partners.

Lindsay Gifford, PhD, is Assistant Research Professor at the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. Her research focuses on everyday life under the authoritarian state in the Middle East and Middle Eastern refugee experiences through forced migration trajectories in the region and into the diaspora in the Global North. 

She has taught in the areas of refugees, forced migration, displacement, Middle Eastern anthropology, and social science research methods. She is the author of “Homeland (Dis-)Engagement Processes among the New Syrian Diaspora” in The Contemporary Middle East in an Age of Upheaval (James L. Gelvin, ed., Stanford 2021) and “Middle Eastern Refugeehood in the Happiest Place on Earth: Syrians and Iraqis Entering Finland’s Welfare State Bureaucracy” in Un-Settling Middle Eastern Refugees (Marcia Inhorn and Lucia Volk, eds., Berghahn 2021), among others. Her dissertation research focused on informal gendered civil society networks under the authoritarian Syrian state, particularly working-class women’s rotating credit associations. 

Minal Giri, MD, is a pediatrician and former medical director of Melrose Park Pediatrics, a practice that served a largely immigrant population on the outskirts of Chicago for nearly 20 years.  Giri also performs medical forensic evaluations on behalf of unaccompanied immigrant children and asylum seekers. She has served as a consultant for the Organization for Refugee Resettlement and contributed to the development of trauma-centered regulations for unaccompanied children. 
 
Giri is founder and chair of the Illinois Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics Refugee Immigrant Child Health Initiative and co-chair of the Midwest Human Rights Consortium, a multi-disciplinary, multi-institution organization that facilitates forensic evaluations to support asylum seekers in immigration proceedings. She also serves on the executive committee of the National American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Immigrant Child and Family Health.

Rohini Haar, MD, MPH, is Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at the School of Public Health and Joint Medical Program, and Lecturer at the Law School, University of California, Berkeley. She serves as Medical Advisor to Physicians for Human Rights and practices emergency medicine in Oakland, California. 

In her research, she uses population methods to study the impact of human rights violations – such as torture, violations of free speech and assembly, and war crimes – on health; currently, she is investigating these impacts in Colombia, Syria, and Myanmar. She is particularly interested in the protection of health workers and health services in conflict and in developing strong research methodology in fragile contexts. 

Nicole Hallett, JD, is Clinical Professor of Law and directs the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the UChicago Law School, which provides legal representation to immigrant communities in Chicago. This includes individual representation of immigrants in removal proceedings, immigration-related complex federal litigation, and policy and community education projects on behalf of community-based organizations. Her scholarship focuses on domestic and regional migration law and policy; the intersection of migration and labor rights; federalism and judicial review in the US immigration system; immigration and national security; and collective action and power-building in immigrant communities. In her practice, she specializes in creative lawyering through complex litigation and multi-pronged advocacy. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, NPR, The Nation, the Today Show, the Intercept, and the Associated Press, among other places.

Aimee Hilado, PhD, LCSW is a practitioner-scholar and community-based intervention researcher specializing in immigration trauma and refugee mental health. She is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, where she teaches and conducts research on understudied pathways to promoting mental wellness and adjustment for new arrivals in the United States. Her research lab, The Refugee Wellness Laboratory, studies diverse communities across different immigration statuses (refugees, asylum-seekers, migrants, unaccompanied children) and across the lifespan from early childhood to older adults, focusing on how their mental health is affected by the organizations and health systems they interface with. Hilado is also Chair of the Coalition for Immigrant Mental Health, a non-profit volunteer organization of practitioners, researchers, and advocates invested in increasing access to culturally-responsive and linguistically-sensitive mental healthcare. 

Ida Salusky, PhD, MPH, is Research Associate Professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She is a clinical-community psychologist, educator, mentor, and interdisciplinary researcher focused on increasing equity within higher education and healthcare settings. Her work focuses on system-level interventions to address issues of structural inequality and oppression. In 2019, she launched the first clinical psychology practicum in Chicago focused on forensic psychological assessments for asylum seekers. She has provided mentorship to students and licensed professionals working in the medical-legal asylum space. She conducts research on immigrant mental health to understand how the asylum process impacts young immigrants, and she designs interventions to increase knowledge about client-centered, trauma-informed care among people working in the asylum legal system.

Continuing Education credit is provided by The Professional Development Program (PDP) at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. PDP is a licensed State of Illinois provider of Continuing Education for social workers (LSW/LCSW), clinical psychologists, marriage and family therapists, and professional counselors (LPC/LCPC). License #s 159.000140, 168.000115, and 268.000004.
 
Most states have reciprocity with Illinois. It is recommended that professionals outside of Illinois review rules for their licensing board prior to participating to ensure that the content meets their renewal and/or reciprocity requirements.

The cost for 5.5 CEUs is $137.50. For Crown Family School alumni, the fee is $110. This program satisfies the cultural competence requirement for social workers.

For questions about CEU credit, email the Professional Development Program at the Crown School (pdp@crownschool.uchicago.edu). (return to schedule)

• Coalition for Immigrant Mental Health
• The University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
• Midwest Human Rights Consortium
• National Immigrant Justice Center
• Pozen Family Center for Human Rights
• The Susan and Richard Kiphart Center for Global Health and Social Development
• The University of Chicago Law School