About Us

Strengthen communities

Documenting the physical and psychological sequelae of human rights abuses via medical-legal affidavits makes a difference in whether refugees are granted asylum.

Stakeholders from the immigrant and refugee community in Pittsburgh have identified an urgent need for forensic medical evaluations for individuals and families who are seeking asylum in the United States. The limited services currently available in Western Pennsylvania cannot meet the increasing demand, which means that many immigrants who have fled from persecution in their home countries have no access to medical evaluations that would greatly improve the strength of their asylum claim.

A study found that 89% of US asylum seekers with legal representation who also received an asylum evaluations were granted protective status, far exceeding the national average of 37.5% among asylum seekers—with and without legal representation—who did not receive such evaluations. Embrace the world. There are more than 60 million refugees worldwide.

In August 2019, the backlog of immigration cases in the US soared to more than 1,000,000, a figure that underscores the immense need for forensic evaluations of asylum seekers. This challenge is shared by dozens of nations around the world and the development of best practices is asylum cases helps address a true global issue.

Education

Education is central to the mission of Pitt HRC. By participating in evaluations and in affidavit writing, students interact with highly vulnerable populations, develop cross-cultural competence, learn how to recognize and document signs of torture, practice trauma-informed interviewing, and become acquainted with ways that clinicians can leverage their training to help those in need outside of providing medical care.

Pitt HRC works to coordinate lunch seminars to share information with the broader University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine students about how medical providers can support asylum seekers and refugees in their local community. We also guide new members to online trainings that explain the context and purpose of medical evaluation in the asylum-seeking process, as well as how students can help.

Advocacy

At Pitt HRC, we hope to do advocacy work on various levels. On an individual level, we will be providing our clients with a social determinants of health screening after they have been evaluated by the physician. Based on this screening, we help connect the clients to local resources in the county. These include resources for food insecurity, housing, healthcare, etc 

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