The Immigrant Health and Legal Partnerships (ImmHELP) is a coalition of legal services and healthcare providers dedicated to supporting the safety, stability, and health of people in immigration proceedings. ImmHELP leverages the expertise of its members to advocate for systemic change and challenge detrimental immigration policies, while empowering advocates to provide high-quality, trauma-informed legal and healthcare services to those seeking immigration protection.

ImmHELP was previously known as the Bay Area Health and Legal Partnership for Immigrant Families (BAHLI), which has been in existence since 2018. BAHLI changed its name to ImmHELP in January 2022 as its work is neither geographically limited to the Bay area nor focused specifically on immigrant families.

ImmHELP’s primary mission is to ensure that immigrants have access to care. We do this by documenting inequities, removing structural barriers to healthcare and resource access, and promoting cross-disciplinary collaboration. ImmHELP seeks funding to continue developing best practices and guidance around working with immigrant children and families and to model those learnings for others across California, strengthening trauma-informed and immigrant-informed approaches to provision of legal and medical services.

ImmHELP was formed to close a gap in coordination and knowledge sharing between health and legal services practitioners working with immigrant survivors of trauma. The communities we serve require trauma-informed legal services, as well as mental health and medical care that aligns and centers with their cultural backgrounds and ongoing efforts to seek safety and stability. Our founding member organizations recognized that failures to effectively coordinate services across disciplines were resulting in missed opportunities for justice and healing. We created ImmHELP to address these health equity challenges by bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to both direct services and advocacy for systemic change. Traumatized individuals often do not know how to access medical and mental health care, and ImmHELP members seek to provide coordination of this care as well as referrals for legal services. Moreover, ImmHELP centers both the medical and legal profession to ensure practitioners are working together and taking into account the immigration status, social determinants of health, access to services and systemic barriers as they work with an individual.

The primary entities involved in ImmHELP are: Center for Gender and Refugee Studies – California (CGRS); Central American Resource Center – San Francisco; Justice and Diversity Center of the Bar Association of San Francisco; Kids in Need of Defense; Legal Services for Children; Stanford University, Human Rights in Trauma Mental Health Program; UCSF Health and Human Rights Initiative; and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals Center of Excellence for Immigrant Child Health and Wellbeing. ImmHELP’s reach is statewide. We coordinate advocacy initiatives with partners serving all regions of the state, including the southern border, and we offer litigation resources and trainings to advocates throughout California through CGRS’s role as a technical assistance provider and trainer in several state and nationwide networks of legal services organizations.