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Our Senior Counsel and Director of Education, Dana Gold will be presenting at the AAAS conference on Wednesday, October 23 at 4pm. Her presentation, entitled, “Preventing Harm to Migrant Children in Detention: A Case Study of Collaboration Between Health Whistleblowers, Professional Associations, & Public Interest Organizations,” will focus on a case-study of immigration whistleblowers and current Government Accountability Project clients Drs. Scott Allen and Pamela McPherson.

Talk description from AAAS:

Drs. Scott Allen and Pamela McPherson serve as the medical and mental health subject-matter experts for the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. When the current Administration began expanding detention of migrant children as part of the implementation of its “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, Drs. Allen and McPherson approached Government Accountability Project, a public interest whistleblower protection and advocacy organization, about how they could speak out about the imminent and foreseeable harm to children posed by expanded and prolonged detention. This case study will describe how Government Accountability Project attorneys and advocates crafted a campaign to both protect Drs. Allen and McPherson as they exercised their rights as whistleblowers to communicate with Congress about serious concerns, but also to ensure their actions made a difference, in large part by working in collaboration with both medical professional associations and leading justice organizations. This case study will demonstrate not only the power of whistleblowers—be they medical doctors or in other areas of scientific expertise—to protect the most vulnerable populations through the power of information, but also how the risk of reprisal is reduced and the effectiveness of their disclosures is exponentiated when they receive support for speaking up and validation of their concerns by professional societies and public interest organizations.

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