Immigration Technology

Technology has found a number of inroads into immigration legal work, with various automation tools and guided walk-throughs set up to help those who are undocumented and asylum seekers apply for relevant visas and immigration status changes. But with immigration arrests rising and opportunities for legal status increasingly foreclosed upon, technologists have turned to helping immigrants plan for an increasingly likely legal outcome: deportation.

A new tool developed by the Immigration Advocates Network (IAN) and the Technology, Innovation and the Law Clinic at Cornell Law School hopes to help undocumented communities plan for the unfortunate potential of deportation. The tool, called “Make A Plan” and hosted by legal tech nonprofit Immi, steps users through some of the key considerations they may need to handle quickly should they face deportation.

The tool operates as a guided interview, asking users whether they have plans in place for their children, bank accounts, homes and other assets. Depending on answers, the tool then can provide users with relevant information about how to deal with parts of the process like establishing power of attorney, closing out credit cards and transferring assets.

Cornell professor of immigration law Stephen Yale-Loehr explained how a group of three students helped put together the tool following conversations with IAN about what kinds of technology would best help support their client base. The group is facing a growing number of concerns from immigrants they work with about how to develop emergency plans, should they be forced to leave the country.

“It makes it automated and easy for immigrants to know how to prepare if they are concerned about possible deportation,” Yale-Loehr noted. “Like any emergency plan, you hope you don't have to actually use it, but you do want to be prepared.”

The Immigration and the Law clinic, which launched last fall, is designed to help students think about ways that new technologies can be applied to help solve legal problems, especially around issues of access to justice. Participating students used Neota Logic, a codeless application design platform, to design the tool.

“From a pedagogical perspective, it was useful for my students to say, 'This is the future of law practice.' It's great to be on the ground floor and learn about it in law school,” Yale-Loehr said of the project.

Yale-Loehr also noted that giving students the opportunity to develop an application that could be immediately deployed was a great way to help Cornell students think through how to both scale access to legal information and make that information accessible to users, especially those who don't have a great command of English, much less legal jargon. “This is not just a hypothetical software application; it's something that immigrants are using every day,” he said.

That kind of collaborative, project-based learning is something Yale-Loehr hopes to see more of in the future. “When law students get out into the real world, they'll be doing this kind of collaboration all the time. The days of one individual lawyer working on a case just do not exist anymore. They need to understand how businesses and nonprofits work, how to tailor their application or what they're developing to the goals of this organization,” he said.