Shaping Psych Evaluation Guidelines for Immigration Law with Dr. Andrew Rasmussen

Melissa: There is new research being done, gathering attorneys' opinions about psychological evaluations used in immigration proceedings and how it's presented to them and the court. And the findings from this research will be used to put together a set of guidelines that psychologists can use in these evaluations. Get ready to dive in with Dr. Andrew Rasmussen.

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Welcome to The Law Firm Owner Podcast, everyone. I am Melissa Shanahan, your host, and I'm glad to be here this week with Dr. Andrew Rasmussen.

Andrew, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Dr. Andrew Rasmussen: Thanks for having me.

Melissa: I am looking forward to today's conversation. I met you at AILA in June. And it was a delight to meet you and hear about what you're up to. I think maybe the best place to start, if you want to share with the listeners and the viewers who you are and what you do.

Andrew: Sure. Well, first of all, I'm not a lawyer. I'm a psychologist. And I've been a psychologist for some time now. My sort of home is at Fordham University, where I'm in the psych department. And where I do some training of clinical psych students in forensic psychology as it relates to the immigration law system.

I've done psych evals for immigration law settings now, immigration proceedings now for a long time, maybe 20 years. And so that's sort of my niche in psychology.

Melissa: Okay. Okay, which is super niche.

Andrew: It's pretty niche. However, in a place like New York, there is sort of an unending demand for that.

Melissa: Yeah.

Andrew: And so, as niche as it is, there's a lot of people knocking on our door.

Melissa: Yeah. Can you share more? So our listeners, some are immigration law firm owners, and some are not. Can you explain a little bit about requirements around psych evaluations for those that may not be as familiar?

Andrew: Yeah. The basic idea is the same whether it's immigration court or civil court, or criminal court, right? In that you are acting as an expert, right? You're asked to give expert testimony. As an expert, you can introduce facts. And the differences, I think, well, there are a number of them.

First of all, the rules of evidence are a little bit more loosey goosey in immigration court. Immigration court is, I'm sure, many of your listeners know, is not actually in the judicial system. It's part of the executive branch. And as a result, there are some strange things that go on there.

One major difference from the attorney's point of view and from the client's point of view is that in immigration court, in many cases, there's just no other evidence to go on, right? If you think of somebody who's, for instance, seeking asylum from somewhere on the other side of the world, where they're not bringing evidence of what happened to them, that is, right? There's no news reports, or there usually aren't news reports. There's not, they're not bringing eyewitnesses with them.

And so, attorneys tend to rely on psychologists and their evaluations to do a number of things. One, to sort of establish that something happened. You know, a psychologist can act as or can assess somebody's credibility, right? We have some skills around that, whether they're being consistent across contexts, whether they are, or whether they're being inconsistent in ways we would expect given what we know about them.

For instance, some we know that the effects of traumatic experiences can change how you think of the experience, right? If you're very stressed, and we can get into that.

And so those are two ways that they differ. The other way they differ, which is sort of the reason that I wanted to come on this podcast, is that whereas in criminal forensic psych and in civil forensic psych, there are pretty good guidelines for psychologists to follow. We have, you know, associations of psychologists working in law that are now 50 years old. But in immigration court, there just aren't guidelines.

And so, one of the things that myself and a colleague at City University of New York, Adeyinka Akinsulure-Smith, she and I are working together to try and talk to immigration attorneys and then also those, there are representatives which are accredited representatives for people seeking asylum, getting a sense of how they, how they use psych evals in cases. The idea is, again, we're trying to set up guidelines for psychologists to follow.

Melissa: Mhm. Okay. Yeah, so I guess this is a perfect segue to talk more about. Talk about the research you're doing. You just alluded to it, but I would love for you to go into it because I think there's such an opportunity here for listeners to, if they are immigration attorneys, to get involved with and to complete the, is it a survey with the research?

Andrew: We have a survey, yep.

Melissa: Okay. And then, but also, we have a lot of listeners that are friends with law firm owners who own immigration firms. So just passing the word around, because I think…

Andrew: That would be great.

Melissa: …the more data you can get, the better you can help in certain. So I would love to hear more just about the research and what your goal is.

Andrew: Sure. So our research project is really sort of has three stages of it, and we're in the second of three stages, without getting into too many details. We started out just by talking with experienced immigration attorneys about, you know, when they request these evaluations, what do they find useful or helpful to their case and what is not so helpful. Psychologists, when we when we write evaluations, we like to write a lot and we like to get into all the different nooks and crannies of people's well-being, for better or worse. And in the courtroom, attorneys have always told me, I don't need all that. Just, I want something, I want something that speaks to the claims of the case, right?

And so in addition, so there's this idea of focusing the evaluation on the claims of the case. In addition, there are always pieces that psychologists bring up or that they look into that attorneys are like, hmm, well, is that really relevant? And what they're saying is that doesn't look good for my client, right?

So if there's extensive substance abuse or a prostitution charge or something like this, right? I've always, when I, you know, and those are obviously legitimate mental health issues. And so it's not like I can just, oh, well, we'll just take it out. You know, we're not going to delete it just because it doesn't look good. But how it's contextualized, how it speaks to the claim, is important, right?

Melissa: So, I'm sorry if this is naive or, but you said a prostitution charge, for example. Yeah. You said that's that's a mental health…

Andrew: Well, it might be related to mental health issues, right? Or it might be related to somebody's, I mean, it might be, there might, it might actually, you know, being a sex worker has emotional consequences, right?

Melissa: Totally. Okay, so that's kind of what you mean. There's

Andrew: Yeah, and so, but there are these things that sometimes attorneys are like, well, this is a fact that doesn't look so good, right? I've I had one attorney, one experienced attorney talked to me and was like, and then there's the issue of bad facts, right? If these bad facts for my client, right? Well, you know, clients seeking asylum but they're, they've got an addiction and they, you know, prostituted themselves in order to fund their addiction. How can we talk about that?

And so it's useful for psychologists who go into this field to understand that they're going to get pushback on that. What they do with that pushback is, you know, I can't tell them what to do with it, right? We do have ethical standards. We have to report things, but, but they should know that there's going to be some pushback and that in the world of immigration court, a lot of claims, by the way, are discretionary, right?

So, you know, the old, what was it? Somebody at AILA, correct me if I'm wrong. Somebody at AILA came by in a bow tie, an older guy, and he was like, yeah, you know, it's good to know the, what did he say? It's good to know the law, it's better to know the facts, but it's best to know the judge, right? And judges really make a difference in immigration court. Of course, they always make a difference, but in immigration court, it's there was a study, oh, it was maybe 5, 10 years ago of immigration judges and whether people who are applying for asylum got their claim or not. And there was such wide variety, and it was almost all due to the judge, right?

So, you know, when somebody, there's a judge in New York who I won't name, but if somebody has, you know, had an alcohol problem or he's telling a story and the and the asylum seeker says, oh, and then I had a few beers and then I got in my car and drove, you know, if the judge hears that, they're going to, that's it. No way, it doesn't matter how bad things are, they're going back home.

So, interaction between these bad facts and who the judge is. And as a psychologist, I know this stuff now because I've been doing this stuff, these evaluations for 20 years. But when we train clinical psychologists to do evaluations, they don't consider sort of the legal context of things. And so that's what the study is really about.

Melissa: Yeah. What kinds of things do you ask in the survey?

Andrew: An overall framework of the survey is things that are helpful and things that are not helpful. And we have the sort of helpful, not helpful slider, which you can say, okay, this is really helpful, this is only a little helpful, this is neutral, right? And we have different elements of a of the survey there.

So, you know, and we do it in two ways. One, we ask in general, you know, something like, um, let me see if I can think of a item off the top of my head. Um, the presentation of malingering, a presentation of a malingering test, right? So this malingering idea is, the idea behind malingering is somebody is exaggerating to gain something, right? They say, oh, it was really, really bad. I'm so, I can't deal with life. It's so awful. And the idea is, um, that there are malingering tests that we have that can detect when somebody is feigning.

And so whether that's in a report or not, some lawyers will say, yeah, well, the judges want it now, so it's good to have it in there. Other immigration lawyers have told me, I don't even want that in there because it brings up the possibility that somebody's faking their emotional well-being. And so, people on the survey can say, yeah, that's pretty good or that's helpful or not so helpful, right?

Melissa: Okay.

Andrew: We then present some cases. So we have some vignettes where we present some cases because we know you guys always think in cases, you don't think in general, general things. So, and so there's an asylum case, there's a VAWA, Violence Against Women case. There's a, um, there's a trafficking case in there. And then we ask specific things about that, right?

The trafficking case, for instance, she was arrested for prostitution. Is that helpful in this case? Is that not so helpful in this case? We expect most people to say not helpful, but the presentation of it, how it's presented in the vignette is what we're looking at as well.

Melissa: Okay. Yeah. I will you say a little more about how this informs how you teach?

Andrew: At a sort of very basic level, um, because psychology grad students aren't coming in with a law degree. I have had one or two actually come in with a law degree, but those folks aside, and no one else knows about the law.

Melissa: Yeah.

Andrew: And so, at a very basic level, it's just informing them that lawyers are, the what matters for an attorney is different than what matters in terms of the standards for when something is a fact and when it's not a fact anymore, right?

And just, and then the other issue is that, uh, psychologists when they do an evaluation are trying to, they're usually thinking, okay, let me get the good, bad, and the ugly about this person in order to work up a treatment plan for them. Forensic settings, you know, very different. You may want, we may want to put a treatment plan or suggestions of a treatment plan towards the end of a forensic report, but you're not getting a treatment plan in this particular forensic setting, right? You're getting a really an evaluation of credibility. That's what it comes down to. Is this person credible? Does what they're going through now fit with what they've already been through?

Melissa: I mean, that makes me want to ask you more about at the towards the beginning you said the ways in which they present could be expected and normal given the trauma that they've been through. And so, I'm gathering it's taking that into consideration differently with what you're trying to teach based on having some context for their history. Is that correct?

Andrew: Yeah, yeah. And indeed, we started off this project by talking to a bunch of supervisors and a couple people who had who were pro bono counsel, and some law school clinic supervisors about what a in these psychological reports was helpful, what was not helpful, and a few other things.

Universally, they mentioned, you know, because so many of our clients have gone through something bad, we want to know about what that bad thing has done to them now, right? And has done to their memory. Not only whether they remember all the details of what's happened, but also things like the chronology, right? You can have all the details, but have them out of order, right?

And because judges and, of course, the ICE lawyers are really attuned to the consistency of stories, and because the records that you do have, the evidence you do have in these cases is from things like customs and border patrol records, and for kids who come across, it's Office of Refugee Resettlement records. And sometimes those records will say something that's out of sync with what the person's testifying to in court.

And so what a lot of attorneys talked about was, well, when psychologists talk about trauma and the effects of trauma, which most people who are using these sorts of claims have, there needs to be some explanation about how that may have affected their memory.

Melissa: Yeah. It's almost like if it's not taken into consideration, and I know I’m not speaking very academically here, but I was going to say if it’s not taken into consideration, they're sort of screwed. The process is…

Andrew: Completely.

Melissa: Yeah. And so, what was running through my head is that you're a researcher. And so I imagine that as a scientist of sorts, that you are really looking to get to the truth of things through the work that you're doing. And is there at all a part, is that just that trumps? That's your driving, that's your north star? Or is your north star something else with this research?

Andrew: This research is very applied in that it's really trying to get a well-researched, um, well-researched perspective on how immigration attorneys and other representatives of immigration court use these psych evals. With the idea that there are some things that will be surprising to psychologists. And so what we need to do is take the information that you guys are giving us and then set out a certain set of guidelines. What exactly those, I wish I was thinking earlier I was like, let me think of what would a guideline look like at this point. And given that we're in the middle of research, I don't have any good examples. I mean, I have ideas.

Melissa: Yeah.

Andrew: I think there's probably a guidelines surrounding this issue of if somebody has a trauma experience, and we have strict criteria for what a trauma experience is, it's not just something bad happened, right? Um, but if somebody had a traumatic experience and they look like they had, you know, a trauma reaction at the time of that experience, then we need to, think about their, how it might have affected their memory of that experience, right? That's probably something that should be considered.

Melissa: Yeah.

Andrew: Yeah. Another guideline, which is a little more straightforward maybe is when you give a diagnosis. So psychology, you know, we psychologists, we give diagnoses, right? We talk about different disorders and diseases and things like that.

Whereas in a clinical setting, just, you know, somebody comes in, wants treatment, we can do, we can just give them a label, and somebody else looking at the report will say, oh yeah, okay, I know what that means.

In a forensic setting, we need to be a lot more specific. We need to talk about the specific symptoms of that diagnosis. We need to connect those symptoms of the diagnosis to the claim they're making. And so there's probably a guideline that'll come out of this that has to do specifically with this.

Melissa: Okay. Yeah.

Andrew: So that's the point of the sort of research. It's not a it's not really asking too much about the immigration attorneys themselves. It's more about getting information to then, uh, use it in writing these guidelines for the field.

Melissa: Yeah. Yeah. Which at the moment, are there guidelines?

Andrew: No.

Melissa: You be, so you're creating the first set of guidelines that would exist.

Andrew: That's right.

Melissa: Okay.

Andrew: Yeah, that was this was after 20 years of doing this, I was like, there's got to be guidelines around. There are a bunch of, um, a bunch, and I say a bunch, I'm talking about three or four books that have been written by psychologists that suggest things, but it's all practice-based. It's all someone like me who's done this for a while is, uh, saying, you know, this has been my experience. Those are great starts. But in terms of actually asking attorneys how they use these evaluations, beyond a handful of little, little studies. There's two studies I found, there just wasn't much. So that's why, that's why I'm doing this. This has got to be done.

Melissa: So, at AILA, I have a very specific memory of you seeing you behind your booth, and I don't know if you remember this, but there was a booth next to yours that was giving away a free iPad. And I was like, I'm a vendor. And you, you were like, take the iPad.

Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Melissa: So, you stood out to me, you had a great sense of humor and but then, you know, it's it was hard to see every booth and I think for whatever reason, I stopped at the end of that line, and but you came over to our booth and so we got to chat some more, which was great. Can you share, is that the sole reason you had a booth there was to help get participants in the survey?

Andrew: That's right.

Melissa: Yeah. Okay.

Andrew: That's right. I got I got some, the backstory is I got a grant from the American Psych and Law Society to do this work. And so I had this and I said, well, if what am I going to do? I'm not going to, I need to go where the immigration lawyers are. And so I went to AILA. I had actually had a little bit of contact with AILA in that I worked on a project with Chuck Cook, 15, 20 years ago, who used to be the AILA president. He was around, I saw him again out there in Aurora a few weeks ago again, it was fun to see him.

But, uh, so I already sort of had this in like, okay, that's where I got to go. And so yeah, we got a booth, they gave us a nonprofit rate, still a lot of money. And we hung out in that hall for three days. I hired a couple of really go-getter psychology grad students from who are at the University of Denver, who were students of somebody that I know just through the field. And so they, and they were great. They were all over there, handing out, starting conversations with people, and…

Melissa: Oh, that's great.

Andrew: So yeah, it was funny because everybody thought I was, they thought we were selling psych evals, right? Everybody came up to, so how much do you charge? I was like, well, actually, we're not selling, we want you to take a survey. They're like, what? Uh,

Melissa: You're a rare breed in the halls like that.

Andrew: It was very funny. It was also funny for me to see how many people were actually selling psych evals. Like, I just hadn't thought of those folks.

Melissa: Did you go talk to them?

Andrew: Yeah, oh yeah. It was fascinating.

Melissa: Cool. Okay. Yeah. I don't know a lot about that world either, so I don't know.

Andrew: Yeah, so my sense of it is that post-COVID, uh, there was the realization that you can do quite a bit of psychology, uh, over Zoom, you know, Microsoft Teams, what have you. It certainly has become the norm for a lot of private practice therapy.

Evaluation, it's harder, at least for me, maybe I'm just old and don't know about this stuff, but it's harder for me to do evaluation, at least solely, uh, on screen. I like to go actually sit in the room with the person. But a lot of people are doing it that way. And so, a few enterprising folks who are licensed to do evaluations at various types of licenses, not just psychologists, but also social workers, some just mental health counselors who have an extra training in evaluation, are doing this stuff remotely. And you can, and I, you know, I talked to one outfit, they said, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll we'll do, we have this price for, uh, getting it to you in two weeks, this price for a week, and if you really need it for 24 hours, we'll talk about the price, you know. Which is interesting. It certainly speaks to the need, or the at least the perceived need, of these sorts of evaluations.

Melissa: Yeah.

Andrew: And it suggests that it's a growing a growing business, which of course, with all the, uh, developments in immigration detention that have been going on in the last, well, week, let alone the last few months. It's likely that this will, you know, be an area that is growing. So.

Melissa: That's great. Did you have any, with any of those booths or anyone else, did you have any good unlocks for you or potential avenues to really get this word out? I hope that this helps, but.

Andrew: Yeah, yeah, certainly. I mean, I got, and I had a lot of really interesting conversations just with people who came by, right? I mean, and just to see, for me what was so helpful was, I you know, I've been in New York and I've been in, where the grant rates for asylum is pretty high. The availability of lawyers for people seeking some sort of, uh, protective or victimization claim, sorry, persecution or victimization claim, pretty high. And then just the availability of sort of nonprofit support in general. You know, so it's a very sort of, it's a little rarified out here in terms of immigration law. And I've been mostly in touch with the nonprofit legal world. So public interest law firms that have an immigration section or something like that.

Melissa: Yeah.

Andrew: Every once in a while, certainly, I work with a private lawyer here, and I'm happy to do that, but it's a different scene. So for me at AILA, it was so good to talk to people in other areas that I imagine that some of your listeners are in, right? Some of those who have their own law firms. And so just to hear the variety of opinions on these psych evals was fascinating to me because I've only heard sort of, yeah, they're helpful and you know, it's nice to have somebody on the team who can help out and a psychologist can see this.

I heard, I heard people say, you know what? You guys spend, um, a few hours with the clients, and the judge says, how can you know anything about these clients? And so I don't even use you anymore. I was like, okay, good. I wanted you to take a survey to give your opinion.

Somebody else said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a lawyer, uh, in the county that I work at. This is a guy up in Washington State. Her husband does these psych evals, so all of her clients have psych evals. But I don't necessarily, most of my clients don't need psych evals. So I don't order them. I'm like, okay, interesting.

A private lawyer said to me, look, you really need to improve those psych evals because, you know, they just say something and there's no connection between what the what the, how the person's behaving, and their and their claim and, you know, come on, what are you doing? I was like, oh, I'm trying to help. So it was a real wide, real wide variety. So that was good to talk to people about that.

Melissa: When did you start this research?

Andrew: Um, well, the survey, uh, which I'm trying to get people to join, uh, started, I guess, beginning of June.

Melissa: Okay.

Andrew: Maybe it was May.

Melissa: Are you going to run it for a certain length of time or till you get a certain number of responses?

Andrew: We'd love to get up to 350, and we're about 110 now.

Melissa: Okay.

Andrew: So we'd love to get more people.

Melissa: Yeah.

Andrew: We got a big bump from AILA, which was great. But we'd love to do. What we're trying to do is we're sort of focusing on different areas of the country. I mean, we want anybody anytime, but, uh, we started off with a big push in the Northeast, right? Then we moved to the Southwest, and now we're starting in the Northwest. And we're going to get to mountain states and the Midwest then.

So if people are out there and they say, I haven't heard of you guys, hopefully you'll hear from us soon. We've got lists of organizations which, uh, do these sorts of claims. Uh, we've got lists, individual attorneys which we're who are doing. Our main challenge though, is that we are at this point limited to, um, I mean, other than the AILA conference, we're limited to emails, which everybody gets a hell of a lot of emails. And when you get them, it's easy to say, yeah, right, what am I going to do that? No.

Melissa: Right. Right.

Andrew: So, we've had more luck on LinkedIn. We got a LinkedIn account. It's just psych evaluations, Psychological Evaluations and Immigration proceedings. And you can look us up and, you know, and I'll send you a message soon.

Melissa: Absolutely. We'll link to that page and how long best case scenario, when do you think you'd have guidelines published?

Andrew: My goal, my goal is spring 2026. So, next spring.

Melissa: Okay.

Andrew: Yeah, so yeah, next year.

Melissa: That's great.

Andrew: That's the idea. Yeah, that's the idea. So what we do is, the study, as I said, started off with these qualitative interviews with supervisors, really to help, what are the main issues? What are the things you'd expect? And what are the things we want to ask about in the survey? And so we got those, we wrote survey items, little questions about them. We wrote this survey, which is, you know, about 25 minutes. It's not small.

And then the next phase, once we have the results, will be to do the analysis, and we'll go back to some of the folks that we originally consulted, and we're I'm also trying to connect with particularly some retired immigration judges to get their take on it. And hopefully we'll get them involved in the conversation, wintertime. And then write up the research and sort of put together a few guidelines.

Melissa: Yeah. Okay, that's great. Um, also, excuse my naivete, what, once you write the guidelines, what's the, how do you get those to be formalized in a way that is recognized, the way that…

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a whole other thing. Uh, because this is funded by the American Psych and Law Society, they're sort of the first folks that I want to convince, right? So the first thing to do is to sort of publish the research and suggest a set of guidelines based on the research and based on the deliberative process with the sort of experienced supervisors and hopefully immigration judges.

Getting them sort of accepted into the canon of forensic psychology is sort of another sort of administrative thing. So I think it's really a matter of, um, sort of going to the association and making suggestions and all that. So anyway, but that's the idea. And so where that goes, you know, a lot of guidelines in psychology are just sort of well-published research and people look to them as guidelines. So.

Melissa: Okay, that's good to know. How long does a survey take a lawyer to complete?

Andrew: It's about 25, 30 minutes. So it's not no time, which I which I realize is a barrier. We recognize that, and as a result, we have put in some incentives. Like everybody in that room at AILA, we have iPads, but we what we do is, we are, uh, if you complete the survey and you put in your email at the end, you get put into a raffle for, and we actually have a bunch of them. We have 10 MacBook Airs, 15 iPads, and then we have 100 $100 gift certificates. So this is well funded, and we recognize that, you know, you're not going to be happy just with a $20 Amazon gift card. So we have a bunch there. So it's 125 prizes, you know.

So, if we get a bunch of people in there, pretty good chance of people getting something. And it's a way just to acknowledge that, look, this is your time. We recognize that you could be doing something that's a lot more lucrative with your time than taking our survey, but we do we do want you to take it seriously and take time doing it. It can be done on your phone. It can be done on a computer. It can be done on iPad, however you do that.

Andrew: Sure. Okay. Sure, I could do that. Do you have, how do I, how do I do that? Do I have to send it to you?

Melissa: Yeah, we could get it from you after the episode and we'll put it in we'll put it in the show notes for you. So we'll do the LinkedIn page, also the link directly to the survey. 

Andrew: Fantastic.

Melissa: Is there any other links or resources or contact info that you want to share or you think might be helpful?

Andrew: I can certainly share. We have a dedicated email for this project.

Melissa: Okay.

Andrew: If any of your listeners or anybody, again, puts their email at the end of the survey and checks a box, we will keep them updated with results when we've stopped collecting and when the guidelines are proposed.

Melissa: That's great. That is great. I, you know, I was thinking like a good psychologist, you would put in incentives in place for, but also, I have a hunch and I don't know if you're coming across this or not, but it seems like the immigration lawyers that I get to have the privilege of being around, this is something they'd be interested in doing because of the results and so I'm wondering if we could end on, what is your hope in completing this work?

 Andrew: My hope for this, I've been doing these evaluations now for 20 years. And so I've had to, and I sort of had to learn through the years sort of what was helpful and what was distracting. Sometimes, through some pretty tough conversations with attorneys, you know, some attorneys say, what are you doing saying this? I was like, well, because that's what I'm trained to do. You know.

So my hope is that we can have the same level of sort of professional guidelines and professionalism in immigration settings as we have in criminal, forensic psych, and in civil cases as well. Because there's in that field, the people who practice in that field, are usually the psychologists, sorry, who act as experts in that field, usually have a sense of what they're doing, and they have a literature to draw on, they have a, you know, professional associations to draw on, In ways that for those of us who work in immigration court, we just don't have. So my goal is to create that level of professionalism in immigration settings as have the same thing as exists in criminal and civil courts.

Melissa: Okay. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you're doing it. Thanks for doing it. Yeah, thanks for taking the lead. It sounds like work worthwhile, for sure. And I hope that for all the listeners and viewers, get involved, take the survey, if you are an immigration attorney. And if you are not, please pass this to the immigration attorneys that you know, the…

Andrew: Pass it around.

Melissa: …the more people who take the survey. I mean, you're hoping for 350, but you'd be happy with more than that.

Andrew: Oh, we'd love to have more than that. Definitely. For sure. And we just, we don't, you know, if you're if somebody's not working in, uh, immigration court right now, but have had some experience with immigration cases, please, you know, jump in and take the survey.

Melissa: Okay, great. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. This was, this was a, I'm always interested in what people are up to in the world in their own corner of the world, and this was such a fascinating conversation to learn what you're up to.

Andrew: Ah, thanks.

Melissa: Yeah. All right.

Andrew: Thank you.

Melissa: Thank you.

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