American Psychological Association Calls for Immediate Halt to Sharing Immigrant Youths' Confidential Psychotherapy Notes with ICE

American Psychological Association
Press Release
Released 17 Feb 20

The American Psychological Association expressed shock and outrage that the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement has been sharing confidential psychotherapy notes with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deny asylum to some immigrant youths.

“ORR’s sharing of confidential therapy notes of traumatized children destroys the bond of trust between patient and therapist that is vital to helping the patient,” said APA President Sandra L. Shullman, PhD. “We call on ORR to stop this practice immediately and on the Department of Health and Human Services and Congress to investigate its prevalence. We also call on ICE to release any immigrants who have had their asylum requests denied as a result.”

APA was reacting to a report in The Washington Post focused largely on the case of then-17-year-old Kevin Euceda, an asylum-seeker from Honduras whose request for asylum was granted by a judge, only to have it overturned when lawyers from ICE revealed information he had given in confidence to a therapist at a U.S. government shelter. According to the article, other unaccompanied minors have been similarly detained as a result of ICE’s use of confidential psychotherapy notes. These situations have also been confirmed by congressional testimony since 2018.

Unaccompanied minors who are detained in U.S. shelters are required to undergo therapy, ostensibly to help them deal with trauma and other issues arising from leaving their home countries. According to the Post, ORR entered into a formal memorandum of agreement with ICE in April 2018 to share details about children in its care. The then-head of ORR testified before Congress that the agency would be asking its therapists to “develop additional information” about children during “weekly counseling sessions where they may self-disclose previous gang or criminal activity to their assigned clinician,” the newspaper reported. The agency added two requirements to its public handbook: that arriving children be informed that while it was essential to be honest with staff, self-disclosures could affect their release and that if a minor mentioned anything having to do with gangs or drug dealing, therapists would file a report within four hours to be passed to ICE within one day, the Post said.

"For this administration to weaponize these therapy sessions by ordering that the psychotherapy notes be passed to ICE is appalling,” Shullman added. “These children have already experienced some unimaginable traumas. Plus, these are scared minors who may not understand that speaking truthfully to therapists about gangs and drugs – possibly the reasons they left home – would be used against them.”

Experts Recommend SCOTUS Adopt Code of Ethics to Promote Accountability

Jerry Lambe
www.lawandcrime.com
Originally posted June 24, 2019


Here is an excerpt:

While the high court’s justices must already abide by an ethical code, many of the experts noted that the current code does not sufficiently address modern ethical standards.

“The impartiality of our judiciary should be beyond reproach, so having a basic ethics code for its members to follow is a natural outgrowth of that common value, one that should be no less rigorously applied to our nation’s highest court,” Roth testified.

He added that disclosures from the court are particularly opaque, especially when sought out by the general public.

“To the outside observer, the current protocol makes it seem as if the judiciary is hiding something. […] With members of the judiciary already filling out and filing their reports digitally, the public should obtain them the same way, without having my organization act as the middleman,” Roth said.

Frost told the subcommittee that holding a hearing on the topic was a good first step in the process.

“Part of what I care about is not just the reality of impartial and fair justice, but the public’s perception of the courts,” she said, adding, “There have been signals by the justices that the court is considering rethinking adopting a code of ethics.”

The info is here.

Nuremberg Betrayed: Human Experimentation and the CIA Torture Program

Sarah Dougherty and Scott A. Allen
Physicians for Human Rights
June 2017

Based on an analysis of thousands of pages of documents and years of research, Physicians for Human Rights shows that the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program constituted an illegal, unethical regime of experimental research on unwilling human subjects, testing the flawed hypothesis that torture could aid interrogators in breaking the resistance of detainees. In “Nuremberg Betrayed: Human Experimentation and the CIA Torture Program,” PHR researchers show that CIA contract psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen created a research program in which health professionals designed and applied torture techniques and collected data on torture’s effects. This constitutes one of the gravest breaches of medical ethics by U.S. health personnel since the Nuremberg Code was developed in the wake of Nazi medical atrocities committed during World War Two.

Delving into the role health professionals played in designing and implementing torture, the report uses newly released documents to show how the results of untested, brutal torture techniques were used to calibrate the machinery of the torture program. The large-scale experiment’s flawed findings were also used by Bush administration lawyers to create spurious legal cover for the entire program.

PHR calls on all medical and scientific communities to convene a commission to lay out what is known about the torture program, including the participation of health professionals, and urges the Trump administration to launch a criminal investigation to get a full accounting of the crimes committed by the CIA and other government agencies.

The report is here.