“Navigating and Managing Tensions: Mental Health Care Professionals as Experts in US Immigration Adjudication Processes”

Discussant: Dr. Aimee Hilado, Crown Family School of Social Work Policy and Practice

This paper is based on exploratory research with Mental Health Care (MHC) Professionals who produce psychosocial immigration reports to be used as evidence in US immigration proceedings. Through these reports, the are called on to make immigrants’ experiences and suffering legible to US immigration adjudicators in increasingly broad case types, which expands prioritization for immigrants with histories of trauma. Coming to this work from a range of professional backgrounds and working without clear guidelines, MHC professionals find themselves navigating tensions between various roles – therapist, evaluator, advocate – as they seek to maintain professional credibility as objective evaluators and articulate their expert identity in writing reports. To support my analysis, I draw on theories of learning and articulations of expertise to explore the diversity in how MHC professionals come to do this work, how they learn to produce psychosocial immigration reports, and what the reports actually look like.