I rarely pay attention to advertisements, but one that targeted neuropsychologists like me recently caught my eye.
Sponsored by the social justice and advocacy committee of the Hispanic Neuropsychological Society, it invited me to join online training sessions focused on immigration. Specifically, it promised to help me and my peers document illegal immigrants’ “cognitive impairments or severe emotional barriers that may justify exceptions to procedural requirements.” The implication was that psychologists could help people avoid deportation. Concerned about advocacy overriding objectivity in immigration-related psychological practice, I decided to attend four training sessions over the summer.
What I saw deeply concerned me about the intellectual integrity of my profession, as well as the strength of the rule of law. The sessions focused on “immigration evaluations,” which are mental health assessments, frequently authored by psychologists, that can influence an immigration proceeding. They are widely used when deportation is on the table. Several presenters stated that they considered these evaluations a form of social justice advocacy, and one psychologist said that evaluations don’t need to be comprehensive because Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys lack the expertise to challenge a psychologist’s conclusions. It turned out that another presenter had written favorably about psychologists resisting ICE. Altogether, I left the trainings concerned that biased evaluations may be undermining America’s immigration system.
In immigration law, a psychologist’s findings can fundamentally alter the outcome of a case. A trauma diagnosis, for instance, supports an illegal immigrant’s claim that they experienced persecution in their country and therefore deserve asylum in the United States. Psychological evaluations have been shown to roughly double an immigrant’s chances of a positive outcome. Psychological reports can also explain away credibility-damaging discrepancies in an illegal immigrant’s testimony; psychologists may claim that the errors are due to trauma-related memory distortion. Psychiatric diagnoses are also used to buttress illegal immigrants’ requests for what’s known as an “extreme hardship waiver,” which allows the immigrant to remain in the U.S. rather than be deported if extreme mental or physical hardship to a close relative who is a U.S. resident can be demonstrated. U.S. Customs and Immigration Service data show that such waivers had an approval rate approaching 90% in 2025.
Though humanitarian exceptions to deportation exist for justifiable reasons, Americans should worry that trauma and other mental-health diagnoses are being manufactured by sympathetic psychologists to unfairly aid illegal immigrants. Recent state changes to licensing laws mean that most psychologists can now conduct telehealth evaluations in most of the nation without leaving their desk, and entrepreneurial practitioners have built group telehealth practices capable of evaluating multiple illegal immigrants daily all over the country.
One psychologist who markets her practice as uniting families — which raises concerns of bias in her evaluations — claims it has completed more than 34,000 immigration evaluations. In May 2026, illegal immigrants filed a class action lawsuit against an immigration attorney in Washington who reportedly served 80,000 immigrants and allegedly sent some to a psychology practice called En Solidaridad for fraudulent psychological evaluations. There is clearly a push within my profession to use immigration evaluations to block deportations.
In other forensic arenas, such as personal injury and criminal cases, expert witnesses are commonly retained by both sides to help the trier of fact determine the credibility of each side’s claims. But the government infrequently uses experts in immigration cases, which means that biased psychological examinations on behalf of immigrants go mostly unchallenged. A 2025 study showed that although psychologists can assess the veracity of a patient’s symptoms using established credibility tests, only 25% of psychologists conducting immigration evaluations use those tests. In forensic psychology, an evaluation that excludes credibility testing is substandard, and substandard analyses are apparently the norm in immigration cases.
DESANTIS SHOWS NEWSOM HOW HIGHER EDUCATION SHOULD WORK: CITIZENS FIRST
Only a few years ago, people were paying psychologists to write letters certifying their pets as emotional support animals so they could fly with them on planes. Initially begun to help people with genuine disabilities, the loophole was abused and eventually reined in by the federal government. We face a similar situation with immigration evaluations, so the government should take steps to limit abuse. It should restrict evaluations to the most extreme immigration cases, mandate court-overseen credibility testing across the board, and increase prosecutions of unethical psychologists who abuse the system.
If such efforts don’t bear fruit, immigration evaluations should be reconsidered altogether, though only as a last resort. Without immediate reform, biased psychological evaluations will continue to undermine both the rule of law and the integrity of the nation’s immigration system.
Larry Brooks is a board-certified neuropsychologist in Florida.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
