Psycholegal evaluations in Immigration Court: Free online training series

Feb. 5 UPDATE: The first webinar in this series was a huge success. To register for any or all of the remaining three webinars, click HERE.

Torture victims from El Salvador. Gay people from Uganda. Immigrants with elderly dependents who are U.S. citizens.

In our increasingly multicultural society, more and more people find themselves in U.S. Immigration Court. And, often, psychological evaluations play a role in deciding their fates. Unfortunately, most immigrants applying for political asylum or hardship waivers have very little money, creating an acute need for psychologists willing and able to provide low-fee evaluations.

Working to fulfill this need is my hard-working colleague Anatasia Kim, a professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley and chair of the Immigration Task Force of the California Psychological Association. Dr. Kim is spearheading a drive to train a cadre of psychologists to conduct these evaluations. In exchange for conducting low-fee or pro bono evaluations, psychologists and students will get free mentorship by expert forensic psychologists and attorneys in the field.  

As part of the campaign, the Immigration Task Force is hosting a four-part Webinar series in February aimed at teaching the basic competencies. Immigration attorneys and psychologists will train virtual attendees on the nuts and bolts of conducting psycholegal evaluations in immigration courts.

Best of all, the series is entirely FREE. You can even earn continuing education credits (one unit per session).

The four workshops, each running from noon to 1:00 p.m. (Pacific Standard Time) on

a Tuesday, are:

Feb. 4: Basics of Conducting a Psychological Evaluation for Immigration Court. Nancy Baker, Ph.D., ABPP, Diplomate in Forensic Psychology, Director of Forensic Concentration at Fielding Graduate University

Feb. 11: Legal Relevance of Psychologists’ Opinions in the Immigration Context. Robin Goldfaden, Esq., Senior Attorney, Immigrant Justice, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, and Lisa Fryman, Esq., Associate Director/Managing Attorney, Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at U.C. Hastings College of Law

Feb. 18: Recommended Immigration Evaluation Process for Hardship Cases. Margaret Lee, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist and Adjunct Professor, Alliant International University, San Diego and Former Clinical Director at Survivors of Torture International

Feb. 25: Writing Psychological Assessment Reports for Immigration Court. James Livingston, Ph.D., Senior Staff Psychologist, Center for the Survivors of Torture in San Jose.

You can register for the first training HERE. 

If you have any questions, email Dr. Kim HERE.  

Thanksgiving roundup

Brandon McInerney

Gay panic defendant gets 21 years

The gay panic case of Brandon McInerney that we’ve been tracking here since 2008 is finally over. The defendant, who was 14 when he shot and killed classmate Larry King, agreed to a 21-year prison term after a jury deadlocked in his murder trial two months ago.

"The missing militant" pleads no contest

Ronald Bridgeforth

Ronald Bridgeforth, the man I blogged about a couple of weeks ago who spent 43 years underground before deciding to turn himself in, pleaded no contest yesterday to a 1968 charge of assault on a police officer. His sentencing is set for February. For those of you who are interested in his fascinating life, I recommend a profile (HERE) by Laura Rena Murray in Tuesday's San Francisco Chronicle. As Bridgeforth put it, "Not being in jail is not the same as being free."

From Australia: Prolonged detention and mental health

An investigative journalism program in Australia has aired a remarkable documentary on the psychiatric effects of lengthy detention of asylum seekers. ABC’s Four Corners obtained rare footage of conditions in facilities that are typically kept out of sight and out of mind. The show portrays rampant self-mutilation, suicide and psychotic decompensation among Australia's 4,000 incarcerated asylum seekers. "I have only seen darkness in life and a dark future ahead," explains a young Iranian man who has just tried to hang himself after the third rejection of his immigration petition. In a secretly filmed interview, a psychiatric nurse states that suicide attempts and grotesque self-mutilations are daily occurrences, with as many as 30 detainees at a time on one-to-one suicide watch at her facility alone. Psychiatric staff are shown responding to the overwhelming despair by overprescribing sedating medications. Dr. Suresh Sundram of the Mental Health Research Institute describes the detention sites as factories for producing mental illness, especially for detainees who are held for lengthy periods and those who have undergone torture and other traumas before fleeing their homelands. Click below to watch the 45-minute video, which is relevant not only in Australia but other countries around the world with similar immigration issues.

Juveniles: Lifelong benefits of multisystemic therapy 

In a study that's getting a bit of buzz around the Web, a researcher has found that Multisystemic Therapy's positive effects on juvenile delinquents extend for decades. An average of 22 years later, youths who were randomly selected for MST treatment had significantly fewer arrests and family problems than those who got traditional individual therapy. MST, developed by study co-author Charles Borduin of the University of Missouri, has become one of the most widely used evidence-based treatments in the world. It owes its success to the fact that it involves the offender's entire family and community, whereas traditional therapy targets only the offender without modifying his problematic environment. The new study is published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. The Abstract is HERE; a press release summarizing the findings is HERE.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Photo (c) Karen Franklin 2011

And finally, if you're reading this in the comfort of your warm and cozy home or office, you can be thankful you're not at the bottom of the 99 percent, living in a plywood shack being torn down just in time for the rainy season. That's the plight of the folks in one of the many homeless encampments near where I walk.

I wish all of you readers and subscribers a nice holiday. 

Oregon training on forensic work with immigrants

           "But they don’t speak

English!": The assessment of

immigrants in forensic and administrative contexts

April 18 at Portland State University, Oregon

We’ve always been a land of immigrants, but now more than ever issues of language and acculturation are at the forefront of many forensic evaluations. Never fear, our colleagues at the Northwest Forensic Institute in Portland, Oregon have set up a training to help you maneuver in these challenging contexts.

Tedd Judd, the presenter, is a Certified Hispanic Mental Health Specialist and Past President of the Hispanic Neuropsychological Society who has taught neuropsychology in 21 countries on 5 continents.

The all-day training workshop will address practicalities, skills, ethics, and resources for such evaluations in order to provide equitable services. The objective is to teach skills so participants are able to choose and refer cases appropriately and increase the range of cases they can deal with confidently and ethically. The workshop will include case presentations.

The early-bird registration fee of $175 is good until Monday, April 11; after that, the fee is $190. What a deal for six hours of Continuing Education credits.

More information is available HERE.

Also in Oregon: May 21 training on forensic diagnosis

For those of you planning to be up in the Pacific Northwest the following month, I am going to be giving an all-day training up in Oregon. My workshop, “Psychiatric Diagnoses in Court: Current Controversies and Future Directions,” will be May 21 at picturesque Wallowa Lake in eastern Oregon.

More information is available HERE (or visit my website).

Accidental deportations: Mentally ill at risk

I've blogged a few times about deportations in which ICE officials accidentally scoop up U.S. citizens and whisk them off to foreign lands where their families cannot find them. Mentally ill people are especially at risk, due to their potential to become confused. But in one of the more outlandish cases, 52-year-old Leonard Robert Parrish, an African American chef in Houston, was recently detained by ICE because a jailer thought his Brooklyn accent sounded foreign.

As it turns out, such cases are far from rare. A special report in the San Francisco Chronicle suggests that among the 400,000-odd people detained annually by ICE, hundreds may be U.S. citizens who are wrongly suspected of being foreign.

Once detained, these people may find it difficult to get out of the system. Immigration detainees, unlike those in the criminal justice system, lack due process protections such as the right to legal counsel or telephone calls. Many are poor, and some are mentally ill.

"If it can happen to U.S. citizens, you can imagine how few procedural protections are available to everybody else," says Chuck Roth, litigation director for the National Immigration Justice Center in Chicago.

My advice: If you are working with anyone whose citizenship status is less than crystal-clear (such as naturalized citizens), encourage them to get their papers in order. In this time of anti-immigration paranoia, better safe than sorry.

The investigative report is online HERE.

Sin Nombre: Of gangs and immigrants

This masterpiece of potential interest to forensic folks has it all -- great acting, beautiful cinematography, powerful themes, and amazing realism. The realism is no accident. Young filmmaker Cary Fukunaga spent months in Mexico, interviewing both immigrants and gang members about their experiences. He shot on location, and many cast members are nonprofessionals. For example, Edgar Flores, in the lead role as a member of the Chiapas chapter of the brutal Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang, is straight off the streets of Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

Despite the specific setting of the tumultuous U.S.-Mexico border, Sin Nombre addresses powerful and universal themes of damnation and redemption. At least, that's how I saw it. In an interview, Fukunaga himself said he sees it as being about family -- "the disintegration and recreation of the family unit in its unique and varying forms."

The plot centers around a chance and fateful encounter between Willy and a 15-year-old Honduran girl, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), who is riding north atop a train. Through Sayra's journey, viewers get an appreciation for the intense dangers faced by Central Americans trekking toward the promised land.

Without giving away anything, I can give you a bit of background. Fukunaga, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, was in film school in New York when he saw a New York Times story about a group of Mexican and Central American immigrants who died of asphyxiation and heat exhaustion while trapped and abandoned inside a refrigerated trailer. (Remember that incident? It was front-page news a few years ago.) His short 2004 documentary about that case, Victoria Para Chino, won multiple film awards.

That project evolved into Sin Nombre, as Fukunaga explained in an IndieWire interview. Doing the research, he said, "I learned about the awful journey Central American immigrants went through in order to get to the United States -- crossing the infinitely more dangerous badlands of Mexico on top of (not in) freight trains bound for the US Border. It was like a world that belonged to the old Wild West."

Against the advice of friends, Fukunaga gained intimacy with his topic by taking the same harrowing train-top ride that he would film. (Folks cling to the top of the train rather than riding inside the box cars, because the cars are even more dangerous due to rapists and other criminals.) On his first ride, with 700 Central American immigrants, the train was attacked within three hours:

"We were somewhere in the pitch black regions of the Chiapan countryside. In the alcove of the next train car I heard the distinct pops of gunshots, always louder than they seem in the movies, then the screams of immigrants passing the word: 'Pandillas! Pandillas!' (gangsters). Everyone scattered, I could hear them running past our tanker car. Not having anywhere to run to, I stayed on…. The next day I talked to two Hondurans who were next to the attack. They told me a Guatemalan immigrant didn't want to give two bandits his money so they shot him and threw him under the train. [Later] I learned the police had found the body of a Guatemalan immigrant, shot and abandoned…. Nothing could have driven home the sensation of fear and impotence more than what I had felt firsthand with those immigrants."

Fukunaga's willingness and ability to see through the eyes of others probably owes much to his upbringing. (As Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor put it in her controversial speech, this DOES influence one's perspective!) Fukunaga is described in a Los Angeles Times article as "a wandering spirit with a Japanese father, a Swedish mother, a Chicano stepdad and an Argentine stepmom [who] can't be reduced to the sum of his parts, ethnic or otherwise. Growing up, he shuffled from the suburbs to the country to the barrio ('Crips and Bloods, people getting shot') to the East Bay's hillside bourgeois enclaves. His family, he says, always has been a 'conglomeration of individual, sort of displaced people,' recombinations of relatives and step-relatives, blood kin and surrogate kin, parents and what he calls "pseudo-parents" who treated him like a son."

With this background, Fukunaga was able to capture not only the immigrant experience, but the pathos of gang life in Central America and Mexico, with brutality and hopelessness transmitted from generation to generation. Sin Nombre doesn't give the history or context for the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), which at 100,000-strong is widely considered one of the most fastest-growing and dangerous gangs in the world.

In brief, the MS-13 is an outgrowth of the 1980s war in El Salvador, which led to a massive migration of up to two million refugees into the United States. Many settled in the Ramparts area of Los Angeles, where the gang was founded. Strict U.S. immigration policies in more recent years have paradoxically worsened the gang problem, allowing the MS-13 to gain footholds in Central America and Mexico. The MS-13 is known for its vivid tattoos, but some say members are moving away from tattoos because they so brilliantly illuminate gang membership for authorities. A documentary on the MS-13, Hijos de la Guerra (Children of the War), can be previewed HERE. A marvelous Los Angeles Times photojournalism project on the gang is HERE.

Sin Nombre is getting widespread acclaim, and richly deserves the directing and cinematography awards it garnered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. It's in Spanish with English subtitles, but don't let that stop you.

Click on the above Movie Review icon to see other reviews of forensically focused films.

Oops! Another accidental deportation

Getting arrested, even on a minor charge, can be hazardous in unexpected ways. Especially if you are mentally impaired and have brown skin and/or a Latino surname.

Remember Pedro Guzman, the cognitively handicapped Los Angeles man who was arrested on a minor trespassing charge and accidentally deported to Mexico, where he disappeared for months?

Now, it's happened again.

This time, a North Carolina native who speaks not a word of Spanish ended up on a cross-national odyssey after ICE scooped him up from a local county jail and shipped him off to Mexico. Perhaps fortunately, what with the swine flu and all, Mexico quickly deported him to the Honduras, which deported him to Guatemala. In all, Mark Lyttle bounced among Latin American prisons and homeless shelters for four months before the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala finally confirmed his U.S. citizenship.

Lyttle is mentally retarded and mentally ill. Although his surname does not hint at a Mexican nationality, he has dark skin, thanks to the Puerto Rican ancestry of his birth father. ICE claims Lyttle falsely identified himself as a native of Mexico, a claim Lyttle adamantly denies.

And just as Lyttle was finally making his way home again, you'll never guess what happened: immigration officials at the Atlanta airport tried to deport him yet again!

The Raleigh News & Observer has the story HERE. My blog posts on the 2007 case of Pedro Guzman are HERE.

News headlines from around the U.S.

The major news outlets are running all kinds of stories relevant to forensic psychology. Here is a sampling.

CSI counterpoint

The fallability of forensic sciences is gaining attention lately. Roger Koppl, director of the Institute for Forensic Science Administration, and Dan Krane, a biological sciences prof at Wright State, co-authored this informative op-ed piece in the Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger:

Defendants should have right to forensic expertise

When patients kill

It is always bad news when someone is certified ready for release from a psychiatric hospital and then commits a violent offense. Take William Bruce: Two months after the 24-year-old schizophrenic was released from a hospital in Maine, he hatcheted his mother to death. Here, the Wall Street Journal finds fault with patients rights' advocates who lobbied for Bruce's release:

A Death in the Family: Aided by advocates for the mentally ill, William Bruce left the hospital -- only to kill his mother

Christian Science Monitor slams sex offender laws

As public awareness mounts regarding restrictive residency laws targeting sex offenders, the Christian Science Monitor joins the fray with this hard-hitting editorial by C. Alexander Evans:

Protecting our kids – or jeopardizing everyone's freedom? Residency laws for child sex offenders flout the Constitution

MoJo's "Slammed: The coming prison meltdown"

And if you've got time for still more reading, a highly recommend the Mother Jones special on incarceration, "SLAMMED." It features at least nine interesting articles, among them:

Hard Time Out: The prison boom comes to the schools

Probation Profiteers: In Georgia's outsourced justice system, a traffic ticket can land you deep in the hole

Why Texas Still Holds 'Em: Forget oil and gold. In the Lone Star state, the boomtown business is locking up immigrants

When Prison Guards Go Soft: Even California's powerful prison guards' union thinks more prisons are a bad idea

Not to mention, a "MoJo Prison Guide" with a glossary of prison slang and answers to such obscure prison trivia as:

• What Do Prisoners Make for Victoria's Secret?
• Which Works Better Behind Bars, Scuba or Buddha?
  

Hat tip: Jane

Sex offender news roundup

Florida court strikes down residency restrictions

In a surprising decision, an appellate court in Florida has struck down the city of Jacksonville's residency restrictions for convicted sex offenders. After the state passed a law preventing offenders from living within 1,000 feet of parks, schools, libraries, or day care centers, the city of Jacksonville expanded the distance to 2,500 feet. In striking down that municipal ordinance, the court said it lacked any "rational basis" and thus violated the due process rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.

For an analysis and a link to the ruling, see the Sex Crimes blog.

California police dragnet closing in

Who came up with the myth that sex offenses primarily happen in parks or at schools, as opposed to behind the closed doors of someone’s home? Whatever its origin, it sure is popular these days.

With the state's Supreme Court poised to hear a desperate appeal from four sex offenders who are being threatened with prison because they live too close to parks or schools, parole agents are fanning out across the state and making arrests. Some 855 sex offenders up and down the state are facing reincarceration over the next two weeks if they don't find a new place to live, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Andy Furillo of the Sacramento Bee has the full story.

Appellate court overturns deportation

An adult who engages in a sexual act with a minor has not necessarily committed a crime of "moral turpitude" meriting automatic deportation, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled.

The decision reversed an immigration court's order deporting Alberto Rene Quintero-Salazar, a Mexican national who came to the United States in 1990 and became a lawful permanent resident four years later. His wife, three children and two stepchildren are all U.S. citizens and he argued that his deportation would create an undue hardship for them.

According to the court, a crime of moral turpitude meriting automatic deportation requires willfulness or "evil intent" involving some level of depravity or baseness so far contrary to the moral law that it gives rise to moral outrage. In contrast, the sexual conduct criminalized by the California statute under which Quintero-Salazar was convicted could include consensual sex between two high school students, conduct that is legal in other states, and conduct that would be legal in California if the adult and minor were married.

Steven Ellis of the Metropolitan News-Enterprise has the details on the case, Quintero-Salazar v. Keisler, No. 04-73128.

Photo credit: "Bogeyman" by faedrake (Creative Commons license)

Happy ending for wrongfully deported Mexican-American man

Two months ago, I posted here about a cognitively handicapped Mexican-American man who was illegally deported to Mexico and disappeared.

Pedro Guzman, born in the United States, was mistakenly deported after being jailed in his native Los Angeles on a minor trespassing charge. A former Special Education student, the 29-year-old is described by family members as a slow learner with memory problems.

In the last three months, Guzman said he made repeated attempts to get home, but was turned away by U.S. border agents.

Meanwhile, as he walked the 100 miles from Tijuana to Mexicali, eating out of garbage cans and bathing in rivers, his family was desperately searching for him. The family's pleas for help from both the U.S. and Mexican governments fell on death ears.

Guzman was finally picked up when U.S. authorities at the Calexico border realized he had an outstanding arrest warrant. The warrant, ironically, was for missing probation hearings during the time that he was trying to get home.

Although the U.S. government had promised to immediately notify the family if Guzman was located, he was instead jailed for two days before the family was notified and he was released.

Guzman appeared traumatized and was nearly unrecognizable, family members said at a news conference.

The family's last contact with Mr. Guzman had been on May 11, when he called his sister-in-law from a borrowed cell phone to say he had been deported. The call cut off. Although family members rushed to Tijuana, they were unable to find him.

This is not the first time that a U.S. native has been illegally deported. A similar case 30 years ago also involved a Mexican-American who was mentally disturbed and unable to care for himself. Like Guzman, Daniel Cardona of Clovis (near Fresno) wandered the streets of Tijuana for nearly five months while his frantic family searched for him.

The latest on the Guzman case is at the ACLU of Southern California’s web site.

AP coverage is online through the San Francisco Chronicle.

The “Witness LA” blog has also been covering the story.

But for the most extensive coverage of all, see the excellent L.A. Weekly feature by Daniel Hernandez, “Lost in Tijuana."

Photo (Guzman and his brother) posted with the permission of the ACLU of Southern California.

Mentally retarded man disappears after accidental deportation

The 2005 remake of "Fun with Dick and Jane" has a scene in which Jim Carrey – reduced to the status of a day laborer outside a Home Depot - is mistaken for a Mexican and deported.

If the scene seems a bit implausible, it is not. Especially for someone with a Latino surname.

Last month, a developmentally delayed man who was born and raised in the United States was mistakenly deported to Mexico. Unlike Jim Carrey, Pedro Guzman did not have the cognitive or financial resources to sneak back across the border to his home. He disappeared, and his family has not been able to find him.

It all started when 29-year-old Guzman was arrested for misdemeanor trespassing at an airplane junkyard and was sentenced to serve 40 days in the Los Angeles County Jail.

During a pre-release interview, he said something that led a “custody assistant” to decide that he had “entered the United States illegally” and “had no legal right to be in the United States.” No one knows exactly what was asked of him or what he said. Like many individuals with developmental disabilities, Mr. Guzman covered for his intellectual handicaps by pretending to understand. Family members believe that he may have mentioned a family vacation to Mexico when he was 12 years old.

The jailer contacted ICE, Immigration & Customs Enforcement. Mr. Guzman then signed a form in Spanish agreeing to voluntary deportation. According to his family, he cannot read or write. Most especially – having attended only English-speaking schools in Los Angeles – he would not have been able to read a form written in Spanish.

On May 10, Mr. Guzman called his family from a borrowed cell phone to say that he had been deported to Tijuana. His sister could hear him asking someone, “Where am I?” Then the line went dead. That is the last that his family has heard from him, despite their taking time off work to scour Tijuana for him.

Guzman knew no one in Tijuana. He was deported without any money and without the cognitive skills to get himself back home, according to his family.

Guzman has a birth certificate proving his U.S. citizenship. There are no circumstances in which the U.S. government may legally deport a U.S. citizen.

The family's pleas for assistance from the U.S. and Mexican governments have fallen on deaf ears.