TY - JOUR T1 - Immigration Judges’ Perceptionsof Telephonic and In-Person Forensic Mental Health Evaluations JF - Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online JO - J Am Acad Psychiatry Law SP - 240 LP - 251 DO - 10.29158/JAAPL.210075-21 VL - 50 IS - 2 AU - Aliza S. Green AU - Samuel G. Ruchman AU - Beselot Birhanu AU - Stephanie Wu AU - Craig L. Katz AU - Elizabeth K. Singer AU - Kim A. Baranowski Y1 - 2022/06/01 UR - http://jaapl.org/content/50/2/240.abstract N2 - Clinicians affiliated with medical human rights programs throughout the United States perform forensic evaluations of asylum seekers. Much of the best practice literature reflects the perspectives of clinicians and attorneys, rather than the viewpoints of immigration judges who incorporate forensic reports into their decision-making. The purpose of this study was to assess former immigration judges’ perspectives on forensic mental health evaluations of asylum seekers. We examined the factors that immigration judges use to assess the affidavits resulting from mental health evaluations and explored their attitudes toward telehealth evaluations. We conducted semistructured interviews in April and May 2020 with nine former judges and systematically analyzed them using consensual qualitative research methodology. Our findings were grouped in five domains: general preferences for affidavits; roles of affidavits in current legal climate; appraisal and comparison of sample affidavits; attitudes toward telephonic evaluations; and recommendations for telephonic evaluations. Forensic evaluators should consider the practice recommendations of judges, both for telephonic and in-person evaluations, which can bolster the usefulness of their evaluations in the adjudication process. To our knowledge, this is the first published study to incorporate immigration judges’ perceptions of forensic mental health evaluations, and the first to assess judges’ attitudes toward telephonic evaluations. ER -