Research Team:

Cíntia Collins, Brown Medical Student

Claire Lin, Brown Medical Student

Rishik Manthana, Brown Medical Student

Trang Truong, Brown Medical Student

Therese Zink, Clinical Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Clinical Professor of Family Medicine

Karen Saal, Clinical Assistant Professor of Medical Science

Project Summary:

Despite restrictions in humanitarian migration imposed during the pandemic, the United States continues to receive an increasing number of forcibly displaced individuals applying for asylum, with over 1.3 million asylum applications still awaiting processing as of May 2023. In an asylum proceeding, healthcare professionals are crucial in providing documentation of torture and abuse, and asylum applications supported by forensic evaluations are approved at almost double the national average. Thus, the Brown Human Rights Asylum Clinic (BHRAC)—a collaboration between medical students, healthcare providers, and local legal offices—was created in 2013 to provide comprehensive medical and psychological evaluations for asylum seekers in Rhode Island and Southern Massachusetts. In recent years, the Northeast has seen a dramatic increase in the number of asylum seekers—particularly in urban centers such as Boston, New York, and Providence—and BHRAC’s caseload per year has almost tripled to accommodate this need. Thus, it is now more important than ever for BHRAC to improve our evaluation and affidavit creation pipeline to support this growing community need. Our goals for this grant include: 1) knowledge gathering at site visits to refine our case-processing pipeline, 2) quantification of our clinic’s impact through retrospective outcomes analysis, and 3) prospective outcomes tracking and qualitative analyses for continued clinic and research infrastructure development. Ultimately, this research will improve the ability of BHRAC and other local organizations to identify the resources and specific connections needed to better serve our asylum-seeking community in the Northeast, as well as further guide evaluator and scribe training at BHRAC to ensure that our evaluations and medical affidavits best meet our clients’ needs.