This Is the Texting Service Undocumented Immigrants Are Using to Avoid Police David Noriega - BuzzFeed News
go to original February 8, 2015

When Alfredo Rodriguez and his friends sit around a table drinking a beer, it’s not unusual for all of their phones to light up with the same message.

Possible checkpoint, the text messages read in Spanish, followed by the name of a street or an intersection. Have a friend without PaseLaVoz? Get him to call 832 810 1576.

Rodriguez is an undocumented immigrant in North Carolina, and PaseLaVoz — Spanish for “spread the word” — is a text-message-based peer-to-peer network that subscribers use to notify one another about the precise location of police checkpoints, allowing them to avoid encounters with law enforcement and possible deportation. The service works by gathering text reports from users, modifying them slightly for readability, and redistributing them out to people who sign up to receive messages within certain zip codes.

According to its founder, PaseLaVoz has gathered more than 600,000 users since it launched in 2011, including its core group of Spanish-speaking immigrants and a fast-growing base of English speakers, who also use it to communicate about police checkpoints, though for different reasons. Its creators say the service is signing up, on average, close to 900 new users a day. The network’s success suggests that there is a great, largely untapped potential for technologies designed to help undocumented people navigate life in the U.S. It also shows how, even as federal policy shifts away from deporting immigrants without criminal backgrounds, life for undocumented people is still defined by the need to hide.

Read the rest at BuzzFeed News

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