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Who We Are
The Evaluation Alliance for Human Rights (EAHR) recruits and trains volunteer physicians and mental health professionals to provide free medical and psychological evaluations for individuals seeking asylum and other types of humanitarian immigration protection, who otherwise could not obtain this vital evidence.
Building upon the foundations of the Arizona Asylum Network, the EAHR was established in 2021 as a project of the International Rescue Committee to address critical, unmet need for evaluation services nationwide. The evaluators, partners, and staff who comprise the EAHR represent a wide range of communities and areas of expertise within in the fields of medicine, mental health, and immigration law. We are united by our shared commitments to justice, trauma-informed best practice, professional integrity, and collaboration.
Why Evaluations Matter
Medical and mental health evaluations provide critical evidentiary support for humanitarian immigration claims by documenting the physical and psychological wounds caused by human rights violations and the impact of these traumas on the immigration applicant. These findings are then submitted as evidence for the individual's immigration case in the form of an expert witness affidavit.
In immigration proceedings, the burden of proof is on asylum-seekers to establish that they meet the legal definition of a refugee. If applicants are unable to meet this burden of proof, they are at immediate risk of deportation, most often back to the same country where they claim serious risk of torture, death, or human rights abuses.
Research from The Center for Victims of Torture indicates that 44% of asylum-seekers in the U.S. are survivors of torture, but due to a range of complex factors, such as their persecutors' deliberate destruction of evidence, the abrupt circumstances that prompt them to flee, or limited means to assemble their case while incarcerated in a U.S. immigration detention facility, asylum-seekers seldom have the opportunity to gather concrete evidence proving the torture and persecution they have survived.
In many cases, asylum-seekers' only available evidence is their testimony to the human rights abuses they have endured. The widespread scarcity of resources and support for building a humanitarian protection claim is a major contributing factor to asylum case denials in the United States:
While some survivors can afford to pay for an evaluation, evaluations are prohibitively expensive for many others navigating the U.S. immigration system and increasingly out of reach as a result of immigration policies that limit access to work authorization and safety net benefits for asylum-seekers.
Medical and mental health evaluations can similarly provide substantial evidentiary support for other forms of humanitarian protection, including T-Visas, U-Visas, VAWA petitions, and Special Immigrant Juvenile Status.
Where We Work
The EAHR currently has local staff facilitating evaluations from IRC offices in Seattle and Arizona. While telehealth has expanded the possibilities for providing evaluations to applicants based outside of these cities, we can only arrange evaluations in the states of Arizona and Washington at this time due to complex cross-state licensure regulations and restrictions.
Our local programs are supported by a dedicated National Support Team who oversee EAHR's wider strategy and growth. Please contact our National Team with inquiries pertaining to volunteer training curricula, organizational partnerships, development opportunities, or overall program structure.
Our Approach
EAHR staff receive and process referrals for evaluations from immigration case representatives, then pair referred applicants with medical and mental health experts in their community for evaluations. To ensure that all EAHR evaluations meet a high-quality standard, we provide clinical and logistical support to our ever-growing network of partners and volunteer evaluators throughout every step of the evaluation process:
EAHR staff coordinate appointment logistics, including arrangements for exam venue, interpretation, and accommodations as needed.
EAHR staff are on-call during every evaluation appointment to assist with any challenges that may arise, ranging from technical difficulties to crisis intervention.
All EAHR volunteers receive ongoing training, clinical support, and access to a resource library for writing their affidavits. As a key step in the volunteer onboarding process, all new volunteers are paired with an experienced evaluator for 1:1 mentorship before their first evaluation.
All evaluations receive feedback from an EAHR staff member or peer review from a highly-experienced evaluator.
To ensure the independence and objectivity of our evaluations, EAHR staff liaise between legal representatives and evaluators, such that there is no direct communication between the legal representative and the volunteer evaluator.
While the EAHR team can support links to outside resources for ongoing care to address critical medical or mental health needs identified during an evaluation, EAHR does not provide any form of treatment or advocacy.
The EAHR model is specifically designed to offer consultation, support, and community to all of our volunteers and partners, in an effort to cultivate resilience and growth within ourselves and the communities we collectively serve. We are committed to taking measures to reduce burnout and secondary traumatic stress, expanding opportunities for our volunteers' professional development and training, and building a program upon supportive interpersonal relationships and evidence-based, trauma-informed best practices.
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