Redesigning Psychological Assessments for Immigration Justice at Puentes Advocacy

Many decisions in the US immigration system consider the mental wellbeing of the applicant and their family, but:

  • Regular psychological assessments don’t address legal questions.

  • Many immigrants don’t explain their pain in psychological terms and

  • Feel powerless and threatened by the immigration process.

These factors contribute to poorly informed decisions in the immigration system that hurt thousands of applicants and their families.

Role: Project Founder and Lead Service Designer

Taking a Design Service approach, we tailored the psychological assessment process to meet the needs of several stakeholders.

For the applicants: We tailored the service to increase accuracy, voice, and personal agency in the process.

For mental health providers: We trained them increasing access to service

For the attorneys: We tailored the service to answer legal questions and to reflect the life cycle of the legal proceeding.

For USCIS staff: We tailored the service to provide reliable information

We tackled this re-design by mapping the ecosystem of stakeholders within the immigration system and looking at the application process from the perspective of applicants. We conducted in-depth interviews and shadowed applicants through different stages of the process finding key insights which yielded two key themes—personal agency and psychological safety/threat, for our re-design.

We also conducted secondary research and gathered input from attorneys, paralegals, judges, officers, and mental health providers to identify opportunities to respond to their challenges while improving agency and psychological safety of the applicants.

Using our research we created personas for a service blueprint, which allowed us to identify key elements in the process where we could increase the applicants’ sense of personal agency and safety through the design of chanels, billing policies, education, provider match, and so on.

The service design process helped Puentes position themselves as a trusted provider in the eyes of the immigrant community and service providers in WA State.

  • Puentes increased their case load by 150% in the first year.

  • By improving processes from the perspective of applicants, Puentes was recognized by the WA Access to Justice Board for their groundbreaking community-based efforts in 2017.