Example 3: Immigration Defense

To fully support clients and ensure holistic, person-centered representation, social workers or case managers should be integrated into legal teams, to strengthen the client’s chance of being granted the desired legal outcome and address the harms they have experienced throughout the detention and court process. The supportive roles are important not only because they support a legal goal, but because people deserve support and individualized, affirming representation as they navigate a harmful process that should not exist. Holistic defense is most effective when it is a true partnership between lawyering and social work. It can also have the added benefit of extending the protections of the attorney-client relationship to the communications among social services staff and the client.

In immigration individual hearings, social workers play a critical role by documenting a client’s life, hardships, and community ties in ways that support relief and due process. Social workers help attorneys translate psychosocial evaluations, assessment of family relationships, medical and mental health needs, trauma histories, and community involvement into clear, credible hearing evidence aligned with the legal theory of the case. They also prepare and support clients through the hearing process in a trauma-informed manner, coordinate closely with attorneys to ensure consistency and sensitivity, and provide emotional and practical support strengthening the client’s ability to testify clearly and participate meaningfully in their defense.

Social workers play a critical advocacy role by developing and presenting individualized written evidence that demonstrates a client’s stability, community ties, and ability to safely reside in the community while their case is pending. Social workers contextualize a client’s circumstances within structural barriers and trauma histories that may otherwise be misinterpreted as flight risk or danger. By translating lived experience into clear, court-relevant mitigation, social workers help ensure bond determinations are grounded in fairness, dignity, and due process principles rather than assumptions or stigma.

Social workers in holistic defense play a critical role by identifying and documenting mental-health and cognitive concerns that affect a non-citizen’s ability to meaningfully participate in immigration proceedings. Social workers gather psychosocial assessments, mental-health summaries, hospitalization records, and trauma histories linked to current functioning, as well as capacity-focused letters that speak to the legal standard of competency. Central to this role is the social worker’s ability to translate clinical information into functional, court-relevant evidence for the legal team, ensuring that mental-health needs are accurately understood and appropriately addressed.