HackSC_2020: Shwe++'s Submission
By Shwe++ (Leo Zhuang, Liam Karl, Seth Goolsby, Samuel Sommerer)
Immigrant Civil Rights Challenge
The Problem
Over 52,000 individuals are being detained in detention centers across the United States. These detainees are not guaranteed legal counsel. Notably, many detainees are in the United States unlawfully, and thus a large number of these individuals face deportation.
This lack of legal representation and the threat of deportation combine to make a civil rights crisis, especially for undocumented immigrants. Only 14% of these migrants will have an attorney with them when in immigration court, even though an attorney increases their odds of success two-fold.
Our Solution
While our team was brainstorming solutions to this complex issue, we realized that a large reason so few detainees, and especially undocumented immigrants, gained access to legal counsel is because they are in prison. Once incarcerated, detainees' ability to interact with the outside world plummets and trying to access legal help becomes an up-hill battle. Therefore, in order to increase access to legal representation among detainees, we have developed a website that will allow individuals at-risk of becoming detainees, and specifically undocumented immigrants, to take steps to protect themselves before their detention.
The website is a service that allows at-risk individuals to more easily connect to attorneys in the event of their detention. Undocumented immigrants will be able to register for accounts on our website, say, just before crossing a border or while already in the United States. They will enter some personal information, such as name, country of origin, American sponsors/contacts, etc. This data will be kept anonymous, unless the account holder chooses to share access with family members or other people they trust. Similarly, lawyers desiring to represent undocumented immigrants are able to create accounts as well.
In the event of an undocumented immigrant's detention, the immigrant will be able to log onto their account and flag themselves as detained. If the detainee is unable to access their account during their imprisonment, those relatives and friends they have shared account access with will be able to flag them as detained as well.
Once flagged, the detained immigrant's account will become visible to lawyers on the website. Because the detainee will have entered their personal information and contacts into the website beforehand, lawyers will be able to more easily start building cases for and/or representing the detainee. In this system, even if detainees are unable to effectively communicate with the outside world, lawyers will still be made aware of the detention and will have more information to combat it.
Other Notes
Inspiration
What inspired us to take on this problem was the impact it could have on undocumented immigrants. We see them as refugees, and that the current system is unfair to these individuals. We want to make sure that they have a chance to live a better life in the United States. Their stories inspired us to work on this problem. We were also inspired by the other hackers around us. Seeing them work so hard made us want to do the same.
What We Learned
We learned many of the hard skills that come with web dev, such as html, javascript, firebase, etc. However, with such a tight time constraint and a team of four, we had to learn how to conquer and divide the project, which was a challenge for us.
How We Did It
We started by first creating the bare bones of the website. We made all the basic pages without anything fancy, and setup Firestore. We would set deadlines throughout the two days, and would continue building on top of what we had previously finished.
Challenges
In terms of challenges we faced, by the second day our lack of sleep was starting to affect us. We were having difficulty concentrating, which especially tested our ability to learn new things almost constantly. More concretely, we had several Github conflict issues as well as difficulty integrating Firestore with our project. Some of us had little experience in html or javascript, and it was initially a little challenging to get off the ground.
Made with Firebase.
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