Social Service Project

Founded in 2010, RMIAN’s Social Service Project (SSP) provides comprehensive support to particularly vulnerable immigrant adults and children navigating deportation proceedings, including individuals facing behavioral health challenges, physical or mental disabilities, or other circumstances that make immigration detention especially difficult. SSP clients include both pro se respondents and ones represented by RMIAN staff and volunteer attorneys. The SSP team is staffed by a Director of Social Work and three Social Workers who utilize a client-centered approach that fosters self-determination and self-sufficiency.

SSP services include:

• Supporting clients’ well-being while in detention: This involves conducting psycho-social and other assessments, providing clients with coping tools to help them manage the stressors of being in an immigration detention facility, advocating for their needs recognizing the potential disparities faced by different communities and providing psychoeducation that includes cultural sensitivity to mental health, trauma and substance use.

• Assisting with the development of clients’ legal cases: This includes helping obtain letters of support, requesting clients' medical records, assisting clients in writing declarations, helping prepare clients for testimony using trauma informed practices, assessing the need for forensic psychological and medical evaluations and coordinating this. Furthermore, we provide written assessments reports to educate decision makers (IJ/USCIS).

• Providing case management services: Our services focus on helping clients identify their strengths, supporting clients in recovering from the trauma endure while in immigration detention, facilitating their re-entry into their community and connecting clients to culturally appropriate community resources to address needs such as food insecurity, housing instability, mental health, substance use, health insurance, applying for benefits and other essential services.