We congregated in the Red Room, which was a darkly ironic name for a space that was to be a battleground for social justice.
By 9:30 last Saturday morning, a sizeable group of young technologists had gathered at New York University’s Media and Games Network building in Brooklyn for Hack the Ban, a hack-a-thon with a mission to fight President Trump’s war on undocumented immigrants. Co-sponsored by NYU and CUNY CLEAR (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility), Hack the Ban was thrown together in the wake of the January 25th Executive Order, popularly referred to as the “Muslim ban”, and invited advocacy groups to shop the skills of local designers and developers.
“Tech has the capacity to lower barriers of entry for activists,” said Robbie, a member of ProgCode, a coalition of “progressive coders” responsible for galvanizing volunteers to create zero-cost apps like the ones that mobilized efforts during Bernie Sanders’ campaign. As it happened, Hack the Ban became a working example of Robbie’s message.
Having never attended a hack-a-thon before, I was surprised to find myself in the middle of one that focused on a somewhat unglamorous topic (in comparison to flashier creative prompts, like “Hacking the Driverless Car Commute of the Future”). Some friends had asked me prior to Hack the Ban what we expected to accomplish. While somewhat unsure, I remembered an email I had sent out weeks before urging the listserv to #Resist by informing neighbors and others of their rights when confronted by authority. I responded to my friends that today’s hackers would probably tackle issues from a similar angle, focusing efforts on self-preservation via zipping up gaps in knowledge.
I wasn’t horribly off the mark, but I did realize about thirty minutes into the day that I had severely underestimated this hack-a-thon’s potential. Unlike other marathons, Hack the Ban was more controlled, replacing one open-ended prompt with thirteen specific asks from organizations who had signed up to participate. Of the projects proposed, over half wanted web development or graphics assistance to make text-dense information packets easier to digest, underscoring the importance of Knowing Your Rights.
The other half tackled the immigration ban from the outfield, coming down on it like pigeons on overturned halal. In a sixty-second elevator pitch, No Ban USA proposed the development of a rapid response kit in the form of an Amber alert for I.C.E. (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids, which have become more frequent since President Trump’s inauguration.
CUNY CLEAR then reminded hackers that as of late, airport searches have also become more likely and security has been granted the right to conduct forensic searches of our phones without reasonable suspicion. To retaliate, CLEAR wondered if anyone would be up to the challenge of building an app allowing for an extra layer of encryption in our phones behind which we can secure information that our passcodes, unfortunately, may no longer protect.
Lee Wang, a staff attorney at IDP (Immigrant Defense Project), followed shortly after by asking for help building a public campaign to rapidly connect lawyers and immigrants seeking pardon. “Criminal justice is the primary pipeline to deportation,” she said. Later when we spoke during a science fair-style advocacy-speed-dating session, she enlightened me to some methods of combat, using her hand to slice strategies into two observable halves: “back end and front end.” I later came to understand these as offensive and defensive positions.
Front end approaches, Wang explained, include working with prosecutors to understand the implications of serving criminal offenses and the benefits of crafting immigration-neutral pleas when appropriate. Under the Trump administration, a minor traffic violation could be just as much grounds for deportation as rape or homicide, “so one way to fight from the front end is to plea your local DA to show some mercy.”
If successful, an implicit agreement to trade down “crimes” for lower convictions could protect immigrants. Politicians in Los Angeles have recently launched a similar battle strategy.
So that was the front end, the preventative measures, the defense. To explicate the back end, Wang pitched the New York Pardon Initiative, for which she hoped to set up the digital framework with the manpower of Hack the Ban. The goal of the Initiative is to educate immigrants at risk of deportation about the pardon process, which I came to understand as a resumé- and reference- backed groveling epic with the Department of Homeland Security. Even in the most exceptional circumstance (say, an attempt to pardon basically the Gandhi of Astoria) still upwards of two hundred letters may need to be sent to the DHS over the course of several months and with the aid of multiple organizations. Despite the hard road to a successful plea bargain, Wang remained adamant that the pardon process is one course of action immigrants need to be aware of, an effort she proposed we sustain by building resources like an online checklist.
There wasn’t much time to process all she had said. Since most organizations hoped for a working MVP by the end of the day, hackers had to quickly decide what initiative they were most suited for. By 11AM, everyone had broken out into small groups to begin diligently chipping away at their respective challenges.
I spent the rest of the morning migrating from group to group, routinely stunned by the intensity of enthused hacking provided that most were working within proximate access of arcade games. The ten or so who had gathered with No Ban USA sat staring uncompromisingly at a whiteboard littered with Post-Its, entirely oblivious to the four-player Killer Queens next to them.
The atmosphere was exhilarating, but desperate. By the time lunch rolled around I wanted to pull a mask over my eyes and float in a bathtub filled with a hundred pounds of salt. I imagined that unlike other hack events, Hack the Ban was more dependent on rapid results. While the web development and graphics were straightforward enough, the more ambitious projects brimming with the possibility of enormous impact — lawyer-immigrant chatbots, I.C.E. alerts — already faced overwhelming challenges in the preliminary stages. Developers working on I.C.E. alerts wondered how they could verify informants. They had to imagine themselves as every stakeholder in a chain of information, from coordinators to dispatchers to lawyers to immigrants, to determine what anatomy of alert would work best for each party.
Some talks during lunch proved an effective, albeit stressful, distraction for those who needed a quick recess. A number of speakers came up to dissect and humanize the implications of the ban, including Dara Adams of FWD.us, an immigration advocacy program. “Stories and facts are the things that change hearts and minds,” she prefaced in an impassioned plea to protect DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) immigrants via support for the Bridge Act, a bipartisan legislation that allows those eligible for DACA to continue living in the U.S. with permission from the federal government.
Adams impressively mastered her own stories and facts, first by dismantling common misconceptions about immigrants. One such was reminding us that nearly 40% of immigrants come into the country legally, by plane, with a visa, only attaining “undocumented” status because they overstay their visas (for reasons that mostly stem from fear that blue collar jobs are subpar grounds for renewal). Another was pointing out that while we may have been conditioned to assume that most newly undocumented immigrants are Latino, the fastest growing immigrant population is actually Asian, which in a way invalidates the current administration’s urgency in building a wall.
Finally, Adams provided a short tutorial of etiquette when speaking with undocumented immigrants, warning that, “If they don’t want to share their story, don’t encourage them.” However, she said, “when you’re out, the safest place to be is out…[and] we are relying on Republican allies and media…to elevate and create as much empathy as we can.” She called on the audience to help her curate empathy by collecting stories of immigrants on H1-B visas and student visas in anticipation of a future E.O. that would invalidate these as DACA status has been invalidated. (For those who do, tweet to @FWD_us.)
After she spoke, I went and sat by the window, tapping nervously on my mousepad as I tried to shake scenarios from my mind.
In a sterile kitchen south of Buffalo a father of four smells bleach on the linoleum as an officer ties his hands.
In the growing light of a rust Florida sunrise a young girl sits inside, scrubbing strawberry stains from her fingers. Past the window backpack squares bob down the street.
If I thought I was scared before, I now felt I was living in a Liu Bolin installation, haunted everywhere by people painted into the background and scared to breathe for fear of being found out.
But as the event coordinators dryly pointed out at the start of the event, “we have been fighting long before Trump and plan to fight long after Trump.” In the back, several had murmured in agreement. I lamented my lateness in learning about the cause. I wondered if everyone collectively dedicated a day to hacking the ban what would happen.
Later that night, as the event was wrapping up three hours later than planned, as new websites were launched and graphics unveiled, several groups remained, clacking deep into the well of Saturday night in their attempts to hack the ban.
And here they were, the other components of the Bolin piece. Artists gingerly camouflaging models with paint-laden brushes.
