Human Rights First: Programming to Empower Asylum Case Lawyers

During my six month stretch of time at Lambda Schools, I was privileged to learn an immense amount of knowledge as well as such a large variety of incredibly useful and powerful tools. It was in the last month of the program that I was given the opportunity to work for a great cause and help people who are trying to seek asylum. I was tasked with helping to develop an intuitive website that allows lawyers that are working with people who are seeking asylum to organize, upload, and get much more accurate and responsive information about each case that they are working with. Human Rights First is a nonprofit, international human rights organization based in New York City and Washington, D.C. To further that, the right of asylum is an ancient juridical concept, under which a person persecuted by one’s own country may be protected by another sovereign authority, such as another country or sanctuary, who in medieval times could offer sanctuary. In this blog post I will explain my role on the team at Human Rights First and express not only my gratitude for being given the opportunity but also go over the features that were implemented in my time working on this project that hopefully will be able to assist many people who are either seeking asylum or to help the lawyers that are battling the asylum cases.

The first issue that I was tasked with had to do with how the data that we were working with was being received and sent to our endpoint to be retrieved by our web team. Below is a function that was included…